If you want evidence that big media really DOES get social media, look no further that the announcements of the last few days.

The big story was the unveiling of Playstation Home yesterday at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. (Sony unveiled another social game “LittleBigPlanet” which is designed to be collaboratively built by its players.)

Home combines elements of the Sims, XBox Live, and Second Life. There will be public spaces, private spaces, casual games to play (like pool and poker). Home is also apparently designed to give members the ability to post and share video, music and pictures avatar to avatar. And it has hooks back into networked Playstation console games. It’s a grand unified approach to social media entertainment.

Phil Harrison, president of Sony’s worldwide game studios, told the NYT’s Seth Schiesel:

The packaged media approach on its own offers a closed experience…. You can only enjoy the game experience that the game developer put on that disc. But with the increase in adoption for the Internet and also the increased bandwidth, the Internet has democratized the audience to become content creators, as well as content consumers, and create what I call emergent entertainment. We’ve seen that with things like MySpace and YouTube and Flickr. Now we want to take those kinds of collaborative experiences and make them more central to the game play experience.

Home doesn’t debut in public beta for a month but there were plenty of raves about the demo in the blogosphere. Pete Cashmore at Mashable posted the provocative headline Playstation Crushes Second Life with Superior Platform
Jason Chen said the Gizmodo staff was “very impressed” with its demo.

But there was much needed skepticism as well. Matthew Ingram pulled together a great recap of the nay saying.

But Sony’s effort still sounds kind of sterile to me. It sort of looks like a really nicely designed shopping mall where you can only buy things from one company….Others have noticed the same thing — that Sony appears to want to control everything, as usual.

One of the beefs Ingram cites is the apparent lack of a native economy in Home, just an opportunity for Sony to sell music, Barbie clothes for avatars, etc.

A verdict on Home will have to wait at least until the beta hits the Net. But it was interesting to see Sony’s announcement come on the same day that Reuters published Kenneth Li’s interview with Mika Salmi, digital president of MTV Networks.

In the interview Salmi discusses (albeit with few specifics) MTVs plans to dramatically expand its online profile. MTV already runs three Second Life-style virtual worlds associated with its TV program. Now the plan is to YouTubeize MTV content–offering archival MTV material for users to share and even mash up and re-edit. MTV’s parent, Viacom, has of course been among the most aggressive media companies targeting YouTube in part because the company’s own plans call for it to compete with YouTube.

How far these companies go in allowing sharing and user creation remains to be seen. Are these companies looking to created gated communities in which sharing can be controlled? It’s one thing for Sony’s games division to enable file sharing in Home, it’s another thing for Sony Music to offer files to be shared. Will MTV allow users to completely re-edit and tweak episode of Pimp My Ride, or just old clips of Nina Blackwood? Stay tuned.