News Corp.'s MySpace and Viacom's MTV are partnering again, and this time it's on a weekly TV show. But the program, a countdown show called MySpace Chart, will only air on the U.K. network MTV Two (the equivalent of the U.S. MTV2 channel) and there are no plans yet to bring the show stateside, an MTV Networks representative told CNET News.com.
Members of the social network, which initially gained traction as a way for independent music artists to gain buzz, will vote on select music videos each week that will then be showcased in the hour-long MTV Two show. MySpace Chart premieres on the evening of March 16; a week earlier, pages on MySpace and MTV Two will go live to kick off voting.
MTV parent company Viacom does have its own social-networking project, the "distributed" service called Flux. But partnering with MySpace can give them access to the massive site's audience. "The audience for MTV Two and MySpace are incredibly similar," Philip O'Ferrall, vice president of digital media for MTV Networks' U.K. and Ireland region, said in a statement. "Not only are they both incredibly passionate about their music tastes but they are powerful advocates for the latest upcoming artists, which both MTV and MySpace have a history of showcasing."
Additionally, for MTV, it's a way to bolster the company's new-media credibility; for MySpace, it helps to solidify its role as a pop-culture hub as the market for social networking grows increasingly crowded. In the U.K., MySpace not only competes with Facebook but also with the more youth-oriented Bebo--which syndicates some MTV video content as part of its "Open Media" platform.
MySpace's U.K. arm already had collaborated with MTV in order to find a new anchor for its MTV News show. In the U.S., the two partnered for a series of "presidential dialogue" events leading up to the Super Tuesday primaries.
In some tech circles, Viacom is the symbol of botched digital strategies and old-media thinking.
There's little doubt that operating under Viacom's umbrella has hurt MTV's hipster cred with some tech-savvy music fans. MTV managers, however, are trying to dispel the notion that the company is technology backward, fearful of sharing its content online, and has missed out on the Internet age.
On Tuesday, Van Toffler, president of MTV Networks Music and Logo Group, and some of his top managers met with CNET News.com at San Francisco's Hotel Vitale to outline the company's digital strategy for the future. Indeed, this unit of Viacom appears more willing than any other part of the conglomerate to strike out into areas it has historically failed at or avoided, such as content syndication, social networking, and digital downloads.
"I'm impressed with how experimental they are being," said Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research. "This is a company that is taking a lot of risks...really, more than any other big media company."
Viacom, parent company of MTV, Paramount Pictures, and BET, is perceived by many to jealously guard its content from users posting it on non-Viacom Web sites. Not MTV. The company now offers an embeddable video player that allows users to post every piece of MTV content to which the company owns the rights.
The strategy unveiled Tuesday also details MTV's efforts to get into the social-networking game. In 2005, News Corp. outbid Viacom for social-networking giant MySpace.com. Since then, Viacom has largely been on the sidelines in the growing market. Now the company is focusing on creating a vast array of highly targeted Web sites that are loosely connected and focus mostly on programming such as VH1 Classic, Jackass, and Sucker Free on MTV.
These Web sites will be at the core of the company's digital efforts. MTV sees its content as its strength, and Toffler said he intends to make it more available on the Web than ever before.
In the past year, the company has constructed 32 new sites. The idea is to create a type of assembly line for Web sites, according to Jeff Yapp, executive vice president of program enterprises for MTV Networks' Music & Logo Group.
Those sites that find an audience will continue to be nurtured and those that don't will be stripped down and "reskinned," or refitted for the next experiment. The company also doesn't plan to spend wildly in promoting the sites. It has confidence in their content and the viral ability of the Web to spread the word.
In regards to dowload sales, where the music icon really has missed the boat, MTV is trying to recover from Urge, the online music store and iTunes competitor that it launched in partnership with Microsoft in 2006. The site never truly got off the ground, but MTV announced last year it will try again with help from RealNetworks' Rhapsody service.
MTV is also branching in new directions from its competitors. The company is amid a $500 million spending plan into video games, the high point of which was the 2006 acquisition of Harmonix Music Systems, makers of the rock-and-roll simulation game Rock Band.
The company sold 1.3 million units of the game last year and the deal has helped MTV find a new way to sell music. Rock Band owners pay between 99 cents and $3 to download songs for the game.
Toffler and his staff credit Viacom's management with bankrolling the experiments and allowing the unit to operate like a start-up.
The moves could help convince fans that MTV is still an arbiter of youth culture.
Viacom may have filed a $1 billion copyright lawsuit against Google's YouTube and sends out reams of legal notices demanding that fans remove their video content, but MTV wants everyone to know that it isn't at war with technology or music fans.
"I tell my staff all the time, in this situation cats have to marry dogs," Toffler said. "We have to make a successful marriage of our content with technology. And that's what we're going to do."
While MTV appears very willing to stick a toe into new business models, there are signs that some areas still give it pause.
Forrester's Li said MTV has not been very aggressive when it comes user-generated content.
But Toffler said the company has more surprises coming, including a high-definition video player as well as more music-focused video games from Harmonix.
"We have a lot of confidence in our content," Toffler said. "Were going to make our Web sites more interactive and engage our users with that content. It's not just going to be people chatting online. We'll be able to show advertisers that our users are immersed when they visit our sites."
The shaky relationship between NBC Universal and YouTube has collapsed once again, as an NBC representative confirmed on Monday that the network has decided to stop posting promotional clips on the video-sharing site.
According to the representative, NBC Universal pulled out of the deal on Friday to support the upcoming launch of Hulu.com, the Internet video service founded by NBC and News Corp. that could compete for eyeballs with Google's YouTube. A test version of Hulu, which will stream full-length TV shows, is expected to make its debut within the next two weeks.
The breakup is important because it shows that some of YouTube's best-known former partners are satisfied to distribute their shows online themselves.
"NBC informed us on Friday that they were taking down their branded channel and clips," Ricardo Reyes, a YouTube spokesman, said in an e-mail. "Our relationship with NBC was a YouTube success story, so we hope NBC decides to post more original content and stay engaged with our users."
NBC Universal's first dealing with YouTube occurred in 2005 in what turned out to be a watershed moment for YouTube and Web video. Unauthorized clips from the show Saturday Night Live began appearing on the video-sharing site and helped generate publicity and big traffic.
At first, NBC Universal demanded that YouTube remove the clips, citing copyright laws. Then, the entertainment powerhouse reversed its decision. NBC cut a deal whereby it agreed to post promotional clips of some of its shows on YouTube. As many have pointed out, it was really NBC and those SNL clips that helped YouTube build a name for itself with the mainstream. At the same time, YouTube helped introduce SNL to a new generation of fans.
Back then, nearly everyone said NBC Universal was smart to cut a deal. Analysts were predicting that YouTube could one day be the gateway for all Internet video. The site would be a hub where millions looked for user-generated clips, full-length TV shows and perhaps one day feature films.
But the number of pirated clips on YouTube--users recording a favorite TV show or movie and posting the copy to the site--angered many media executives. To many in Hollywood, Google dragged its feet when it came to preventing piracy. The issue came to a head earlier this year when Viacom filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google for copyright violations.
At the same time, Viacom and NBC started asking whether they really needed YouTube. The companies ratcheted up efforts to distribute video through their own sites and other Web portals.
Anyone wishing to watch an episode of Heroes can go to iTunes, NBC.com and soon Hulu.com. Fans of the Viacom-owned comedy series The Daily Show can just log on to that show's site.
So did Google blow it by playing hardball with the content creators? Did it push too hard when it should have paid the fees the big media guys wanted? This way it could have made those companies dependent on the traffic generated by YouTube and also hooked people on finding their favorite TV shows on the site. It might have been tougher to leave YouTube then.
But Google probably didn't have much of a choice. Such a scenario would have meant that Google would have emerged as a powerful gatekeeper. Google would have become to video what iTunes has become to music, and the TV and film industries are resolved not to follow the same path as the record labels. It was probably only a matter of time before NBC and others struck out on their own.
What this means for the near future is that YouTube, with far less professionally crafted content on the site, is going to compete for eyeballs with the likes of NBC and Viacom as well as a legion of other video plays cropping up seemingly every day.
In the coming months, as YouTube purges its site of more and more copyright content, we'll learn the real value of true user-generated content.
Pirates getting in the way of business? Let's form Voltron.
(Credit: TV Tokyo)The announcement has been made--read CNET News.com's full coverage here.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that an impressive cast of major media and technology companies plans to announce a high-profile list of joint guidelines for preserving copyright and fighting piracy online. Sources told The Journal that the companies involved include media moguls CBS Corp., NBC Universal, News Corp.'s Fox (and its MySpace social network), Viacom, and Disney, as well as tech icon Microsoft and French video-sharing site DailyMotion.
It's unclear whether these are the only parties involved in the deal. Inquiries to several of the companies allegedly involved in the agreement went unanswered.
The most notable party absent from the group is Google, according to The Journal's Kevin Delaney. Apparently, the Mountain View, Calif.-based tech titan had been in talks about joining but did not go through with it. Google is the parent company of YouTube, the wildly popular video-sharing site that had come under fire from media companies for making it easy to share copyrighted content.
Google recently announced an antipiracy technology initiative for YouTube.
'The Daily Show' host Jon Stewart
(Credit: Comedy Central)About 13,000 video clips comprising the entirety of Comedy Central's fake-news program, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart will be hitting the its official Web site later in the day, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday morning.
They won't be full episodes, but rather short clips of segments from the program; the more individual files there are, after all, means that there are more opportunities for Comedy Central to insert advertisements. "Designers have been experimenting with ads that appear for two or three seconds at the start of a clip, recede, then emerge briefly from a corner of the picture like a network-TV promo while the video continues playing," the LA Times article noted.
If the thought of 13,000 clips seems overwhelming, the database will reportedly be searchable by both date and topic--so you can see, for example, everything Stewart ever said on your birthday, or everything he ever said about Capitol Hill punchline Larry Craig.
The clips will go back to Jon Stewart's debut in 1999, according to the Times; it does not appear that the Daily Show's earlier incarnation with Craig Kilborn as host, which ran from 1996 to 1998, will be available. Nor will there be such a database for clips from the popular Daily Show spinoff, The Colbert Report starring semi-rumored presidential candidate Stephen Colbert--at least not yet.
Representatives from Comedy Central have not yet returned calls for comment, but the Daily Show site features a blurb that says, "Get ready for something big--check back later today!"
Comedy Central is owned by Viacom, which has famously sued video-sharing site YouTube over copyright infringement . Earlier this month, YouTube parent company Google announced that it would debut an antipiracy tool for the service, but it's raised some eyebrows because it requires media companies to provide YouTube with their content in advance.
WASHINGTON--Content creators and their digital distributors must unite against piracy by installing more "safeguards," Viacom's CEO said Tuesday.
Phillipe Dauman
(Credit: Dan Farber/ZDNet)Through more widespread adoption of copy-protection features and filtering tools like watermarking, "we will usher in an unprecedented period of creative output across the globe," Philippe Dauman told a few hundred attendees at the first day of an antipiracy summit hosted here by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a pro-business lobbying group.
Dauman lamented that "all manner of intellectual property" can now be reproduced more easily than ever "at the click of the mouse." Interestingly, his comments come as a handful of major media vendors--most recently Amazon.com, in its effort to compete with Apple's iTunes--have taken steps away from use of digital-rights management (DRM) features, which have been known to
But no one should accuse Viacom of being "media holdouts resisting change," Dauman argued. The conglomerate currently delivers more video programming to mobile devices than any other company, operates hundreds of authorized Web sites, just recently unveiled a social-networking platform called Flux and expects to pull in more than half a billion dollars in digital revenue this year, he said.
Dauman said his company supports fair use and would love to see its popular characters on "every nook and cranny of the Internet," but only if the "artists" behind the content are fairly compensated.
"It is obviously impossible to check every computer or look over the shoulder of every user to see if they have a license, and we don't want to," Dauman said.
Still, content aggregators, Internet service providers, hosting companies and site operators themselves need to help in the fight against piracy, he said, adding that several cable companies have already begun working "cooperatively" with Viacom to send notices to people who post its content without permission. He also applauded AT&T for "realizing the potential of new network tools" designed to detect pirated wares.
What Viacom doesn't need is new laws, Dauman said. In fact, evoking an argument made earlier this year by the movie industry, he said any new laws that restrict how ISPs manage their networks could stymie the fight against piracy. Letting the free market operate unfettered would be wiser, he added. (Although Dauman didn't mention it by name, he was obviously referring to Net neutrality, the idea that broadband providers shouldn't be allowed to prioritize content that travels across their pipes.)
Government could play a role, however, in rounding up more international allies against piracy through trade negotiations, Dauman suggested. (That's hardly a new idea in the copyright-lobbyist camp, by the way, with various U.S. copyright policies already exported to other countries by way of trade agreements.)
Dauman also couldn't resist getting in a few digs at two foes in the copyright sphere. He criticized The Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent file-tracking site based in Sweden, for what he characterized as making movies available online before they're "ever shown on the big screen." He also said his company's high-profile copyright suit against Google's YouTube filed earlier this year "promises to be a landmark case that will clarify the rights and responsibilities of all media and content owners in the digital age."
The Viacom suit and other copyright challenges against Google are "ironic given Google's own reliance on its software intellectual property," Dauman added. "Go figure."
MTV has just launched a new social-networking community for youth activism, ThinkMTV, which is designed to network members both online and offline around causes ranging from climate change to HIV/AIDS. While as a standalone network it's not particularly momentous or innovative (although few names come to mind in the "social networking with a social conscience" space that specifically target the MTV demographic), ThinkMTV is worth noting because it's the first major operation to be unveiled as part of MTV parent company Viacom's new Flux social networking initiative.
MTV representatives told CNET News.com in an interview that ThinkMTV had largely been created as a result of the "Just Cause" study that the company had enacted about a year ago, in which 80 percent of young people surveyed said that community and social action was important, but that only 19 percent said they were already very involved.
Some brief and recent history: last week, after some rumor buzz, Viacom unveiled Flux's framework without a high-profile debut. It's a distributed platform, created out of what was once the social networking start-up Tagworld (which Viacom invested in), that will ultimately bring community features to many of the media giant's pop-culture brands as well as external partners. Prior to Thursday's official beta debut of ThinkMTV, the Flux functionality had already been integrated into some smaller niche sites.
Sign-ups for the beta of the Flux community on ThinkMTV had been open for some time now, and a bare-bones Think site was accessible (sans social networking features). The full site includes information resources, multimedia content, and means for members to network both as socialization and as a way to rally for the various causes involved. ThinkMTV has bolstered its community with some big-name nonprofits: The "founding partners" at the launch are the Case Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Goldhirsh Foundation, and MCJ Foundation. The site will also (naturally) be celebrity-heavy, with usual suspects like Leonardo DiCaprio, John Mayer and Bono connected in one capacity or another.
One of the more unique aspects of ThinkMTV promises to be the "Action Badges," which could be considered the digital-age version of scouting merit badges. They aren't part of the initial launch, but will be rolled out in coming months; users can earn them for real-world actions like volunteerism or blood donation, or by submitting video or photo content to the site.
The new community will additionally be a platform for existing MTV activism campaigns, ranging from the company's ongoing partnership with the Gates Foundation to the "campaign dialogue" series that it's organized in conjunction with MySpace in advance of the 2008 presidential elections.
Vintage MTV.
Do we really need another social networking site? Apparently so, and we're not talking about start-ups here.
What we're hearing--and this is industry cocktail-party gossip, albeit a very believable variety thereof--is that MTV Networks is working on its own social network and we'll be hearing more about it pretty soon. We don't have a name, or a target demographic (Teens? College kids? Young adults?) or any semblance of screenshots. This is so hush-hush, in fact, that we aren't even sure whether it's an MTV Networks (as in MTV, VH1, MTV2, Spike TV and the like) or strictly MTV (as in the channel) property. But what surprises us somewhat is that the evidence really does seem to point to the Viacom-owned MTV Networks building something from the ground up in a market that's already pretty saturated (to say the least).
You may recall that earlier this year, MTV Networks invested in social networking start-up Tagworld, which briefly was talked about as one of those elusive "MySpace killers" but has since fallen off the radar. When the rumor initially surfaced, PaidContent reported that MTV wanted its foot in the door so that it had access to Tagworld's technology--and indeed, social networking features are appearing on some smaller MTV properties like the Subterranean blog. It's not clear yet whether Tagworld technology will be incorporated into this shadowy new social network in any way; maybe not, considering the two-million-member Tagworld hasn't taken off the way some predicted it would. (It hasn't yet made a mark on the top social networks list that Nielsen/NetRatings indexes.)
As News Corp.'s MySpace, the social network that made "social network" a household phrase, launches more original video content--like the upcoming Quarterlife, which looks like an updated version of the '90s Gen-X angst flick Reality Bites--and throws concert tours, it's tempting to call it "the new MTV." Indeed, as Facebook stakes a stronger claim to the "social graph," MySpace has been shaping itself as more of a media and trend hub. If MySpace were still independent, it would seem more logical for a brand like MTV to get its foot in the door there through high-profile partnerships (like the upcoming presidential dialogues), but the News Corp. ownership (MTV Networks is a Viacom property) probably complicates things a good bit.
We can't say for sure what MTV--or MTV Networks--has in the works for this social networking endeavor, but they're hoping to keep it well under wraps for the time being. MTV is still struggling with its new-media credentials--recent tech-related headlines from the company have included a music-related partnership with Yahoo, a Twitter tie-in to the Video Music Awards and the aforementioned presidential dialogues. It'll be interesting to see how this turns out.
Spears in happier times.
(Credit: Ellen von Unwerth/Jive Records 2007)Rising up out of the chaos and career collapse that was Britney Spears' performance on Sunday are MTV's traffic numbers.
The cable channel's Video Music Awards were bad for Britney but a boon for Viacom, MTV's parent company. Users flocked to MTV.com to watch Spears' on-stage misadventures.
On Sunday, MTV.com saw 2.6 million visitors log on, a tally that smashed the site's previous record for daily Web site traffic. The site also delivered 7 million video streams on Monday as of 3:30 p.m. ET, which topped its previous best day of 6.7 million.
In a spectacle that will likely serve as an entertainment-industry cautionary tale, Spears kicked off the VMA awards with an underwhelming dance and song performance. The event was supposed to breath life back into the star's flagging career but likely fell far short of that goal.
The pudgy Spears, dressed in black bikini, flubbed her song-and-dance number by forgetting words to music she was only required to lip sync. She also lumbered across the stage with uninspired "dance" moves.
Let's see how funny Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are on the witness stand.
The two comedians are apparently being dragged into the copyright fight between their employer and Google. Entertainment conglomerate Viacom, the company behind Stewart's The Daily Show and The Colbert Report filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Google earlier in the year, alleging that Google and YouTube encourage users to pirate copyright material.
The two companies entered the names of people they each wish to depose in court, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York last week. Google, which acquired YouTube last October, wants to depose at least 30 people in addition to Colbert and Stewart. Among them are Viacom Chairman Sumner Redstone and CEO Philippe Dauman.
Viacom wants to question YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley in addition to Google CEO Eric Schmidt and founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Viacom could argue that interviewing Stewart and Colbert is irrelevant to the case and will try to convince the judge that deposing them is unnecessary. It's customary for corporations to jockey over the depositions of high-level executives or representatives, as Microsoft did with Bill Gates' deposition during its government antitrust trial in Washington, D.C. a decade ago.
"The rules for discovery are very broad," said Mark Litvack, an intellectual property attorney for Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. "But courts don't let you go on fishing expeditions. If people are added for tactical reasons rather than for legal reasons it's almost always scorned."
Google attorneys could argue that the comedians and the producers of their shows have made public statements that are very relevant.
For example, a year ago Colbert urged fans to make him a viral-video star. The comedian stood before a green screen on his show and played with a light saber. He encouraged fans to fill in the background in their own videos and submit them to his show.
"This could go to determining non-infringing uses," Litvack said. "If Viacom used the clips for marketing or promotional purposes Google could argue that Colbert needs to be deposed."
One question Google could ask is whether anyone at Viacom uploaded clips of Colbert or Stewart's shows to YouTube.
Before Viacom began demanding that YouTube remove them, snippets from The Colbert Report and The Daily Show were among YouTube's most popular.
According to court documents, lawyers expect the pre-trial to conclude in December 2008. This would mean that the case may not get to a jury until sometime in the spring of 2009, Litvack said.
