- Alex Woodson, The Hollywood Reporter, and Brian Morrissey

NEW YORK News Corp.'s MySpace said Friday that it would roll out a redesigned home page, TV player and other enhancements beginning next week.

The social networking giant also will overhaul site navigation, its profile editor and its search system.

MySpace will relaunch its home page Wednesday, the culmination of a project the company has been working on since December. The new page, MySpace sales and marketing president Jeff Berman said, will feature "bigger and more powerful" options for brand takeovers.

"We saw there was enormous opportunity to build a new home page and navigation that were cleaner and easier and enabled the community to experience the site in a deeper way and at the same time provide enormous brand opportunities," said Berman.

Berman described the new look as "elegant," and said it continues MySpace's evolution from a social network to a "social portal." MySpace reports that 35-40 million people land on its home page each day.

Past brand takeovers have featured Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Nestea and Taco Bell. A "major advertiser" will take over the page Thursday.

The updated video player for MySpaceTV will have support of HD, a full-screen mode and new options for video sharing. It also will have a more flexible advertising platform, making it easier to use different formats.

The new navigation will be "more organized around people, content and culture," Berman said, and the new search will feature tabs for categories, including people, music and MySpaceTV. The new profile editor "will allow users who are not necessarily schooled in HTML to customize pages as if they were," he added.

Berman said the idea for the overhauls came a year ago during an executive retreat.