Amit Kapur is Vice President Business Development at MySpace.

Liz commented that the creators of Roommates and Quarterlife are not getting paid upfront. Instead it’s a revenue sharing scheme with no upfront guarantees, Kapur explained.

With Prom Queen, MySpace had the exclusive for the first several hours and with that got 75 percent of all of the views (at least for the time being) Kapur said.

Roommates is the first example of original programming. “It’s surprisingly cheap to produce this stuff,” Kapur said offhandedly, to which Liz responded with due sarcasm “You don’t say?” “We’re not producers of content,” Kapur admitted. “There are great producers of content out there.” Instead, Kapur says, MySpace goes and looks for the creators and then can serve ads around it.

“We are first and foremost a community site and second a video site.” Kapur stressed that interactivity and community are key. “One of the characters on Roommates got 40,000 e-mails in the first week.” All of the characters on Roommates have MySpace profiles that they regularly update, interact with, and reach out through.

Kapur said that the new web sitcom We Need Girlfriends was recently optioned by one of the producers of “Sex in the City” for “upstreaming” to television.

Looking at the long tail, Kapur sees different sets of content along the spectrum that is the ill-defined “long tail” model. “At the head there is licensing to “super premium” sites like Hulu. Then at the tail there’s the user generated video. We get 50,000, 60,000 videos uploaded every day.” All of this adds up to more engagement for the viewers, more time spent on MySpace, and, therefore, more exposure to advertisements.

Kapur said that MySpace is excited about the variety of new video platforms, not limiting users to just MySpace’s proprietary player. Anything that boosts user engagement on MySpace is great, he said, and that includes extra-MySpace embeds. YouTube embeds early on helped boost MySpace early on.

Liz said, “You’ve come a long way in the way MySpace exhibits and promotes music and how does that effect your video side?”

“We created this template that blew up, we never expected it to get as big as it did with music. I think you’ll see a similar promotional vehicle with MySpace TV.”

Audience question: Could you comment on where the OpenSocial announcement will take MySpace.

We see a couple key benefits. first it’s a standardized system to multiple networks making it easier for developers. We’re not naive and think that it will happen on MySpace. If we can open up the API and help facilitate people adding functionality and utility that’s great.

What’s your favorite web show?

I like “Can you Blend it?” “Will it Blend?” “Yeah.”