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Update: as expected, Hulu is now live. Get in the line for invites at Mashable Invites. Paidcontent has posted screenshots to Flickr.

For News Corp, judgement time is here. The company’s Hulu video site - touted in the press as a “YouTube rival”, is scheduled for an immediate test launch. Meanwhile, the MySpace Platform, which might finally take the $15 billion sheen off Facebook, is also on the cusp of its long awaited debut. Can News Corp make a dent in the most hyped online properties around?

Taking on YouTube

Reports last week said Hulu was struggling to make the deadline for this week’s launch, but some news outlets have already been briefed on the debut of the NBC-News Corp co-venture.

While the response from industry analysts has been generally negative, the endeavor has one thing going for it: lots of free mainstream shows including Family Guy and My Name is Earl. NBC pulled its videos off YouTube last week in anticipation of the launch, but the company isn’t fully committed to the new project: it has also announced NBC Direct, which will let you download many of the same shows to your desktop. News Corp isn’t putting all its videos in one basket either: it has numerous online video plays including downloads through MySpace and the user-generated MySpaceTV property. Hulu will likely be the buzziest story of the week in the industry, but even the most optimistic analyst would admit that it can never catch YouTube.

Taking on Facebook

Likewise, the MySpace Platform, pointed squarely at Facebook’s platform play, is likely to attract buzz from developers and analysts. The big widget providers have already been clued in on this, if the mails in our inbox are to be believed, but access for all developers may take weeks longer.

MySpace may be messier than Facebook and less appealing to the developer set (at least for personal use) but it has one major benefit: size. MySpace had 105 million users versus Facebook’s 69 million in August 2007, according to ComScore. If the strategy is well executed, MySpace should have a fighting chance here: startups live and die based on their user numbers. My only slight concern is that MySpace has hinted about more of a tiered system wherein some widgets get more prominence than others: they need to be radically open to build that all-important “long tail” of apps.

For those fed up of the deafening Facebook talk, console yourself that News Corp will now be grabbing more of those headlines. But since the success or failure of both projects isn’t entirely in News Corp’s hands, I have a few questions:

–Developers: How much time would you allocate to MySpace Platform development versus Facebook?

–YouTube Users: Are you platform agnostic when it comes to finding professional content? In other words: does the content have to be on YouTube for you to find it?

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