The big media companies have had a love-hate relationship with YouTube and Google. On the one hand, they have loved the publicity that online video brings and the viral nature of the medium. On the other hand, they feel that Google is monetizing their content. “What’s in it for us!” they demand of Google.

Google has tried to respond by creating a program that will share revenue with copyright holders. But they have also gone slow with it, because I think they aren’t even sure yet exactly how they will maximize revenue from online video. The media companies don’t want to give this turf to Google in perpetuity and so they have been playing with the idea of cooperating on their own ventures to aggregate their content on a site they own and can fully monetize. They also would love to sell packages to advertisers that include TV and Web properties based on video. They can’t do that with YouTube.

Today is a milestone in the media companies’ effort to build something on their own. News Corp and NBC have announced they will jointly create an online video site. What is interesting here is that the idea of portability is built in. These video will play on MySpace, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL. Each of these sites will get some piece of the advertising action.

You can read more about this in the New York Times or more interesting notes and comments on TechCrunch.