The Social

This is sort of interesting. MTV Networks, which certainly has a lot of video content out there on the Web, on Wednesday released the results of an internal study to determine what kinds of advertisements are most effective and online-friendly matches for short-form online videos.

The conclusion? "Project Inform," the MTV survey, found that a five-second-long "pre-roll" ad in advance of the clip, combined with ten seconds of a semi-transparent ad unit that takes up the lower third of the video (and starts about ten seconds in), makes up "both the most effective and the most audience-friendly ad product for short-form online video," according to a release.

MTVN calls this the "lower one-third product suite." It was tested against two other ad packages, the "sideloader," which combines the five-second pre-roll with an ad that rolls out of the side of the video window; and a traditional 30-second pre-roll before the ad.

So, obviously, that's a limited number of options and certainly doesn't reflect the full range of possibilities for online ads. But it was thorough: Project Inform ran consumer survey tests across about 50 million video streams on the Web properties for media brands like MTV, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon.

"Short-form online video consumption is exploding, but there's still a lot of confusion among marketers over which ad formats deliver for brands without compromising the user experience," Nada Stirratt, executive vice president of digital advertising at the Viacom-owned MTV Networks, said in the release. "By exploring the viability of new ad products around short-form online video, Project Inform provides the type of insights crucial to creating the innovative, custom solutions that this marketplace needs."

The catch is whether even the highest-performing varieties of online video ads still really rake in the dollars. Online video has been notoriously difficult for companies to monetize, but that's in part because the first variety of video to gain traction on the Web was amateur, user-created content (do top-notch advertisers really want their message next to a video of a squirrel on water skis?) and also because traditional, TV-style ads don't have the same impact alongside shorter Web clips.

There have been some promising signs, though. Video portal Hulu has investigated a couple of experimental video ad formats since launching last year, and has had good news to report on the advertising front--like that its inventory sold out a month after its public debut.

Viacom isn't a member of the Hulu joint venture, which now consists of NBC Universal, Disney's ABC Entertainment, and News Corp. But a limited number of episodes from Comedy Central talk shows "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" started playing on Hulu last year.

This story has been updated. See below for details.

Can you really take everything that's going on with movies, TV shows, music, Internet memes, and social media, and wrangle it all into an hour of live television? MTV believes it can--with some help from Twitter, Facebook, and a quirky British model-turned-TV-host named Alexa Chung.

The pop-culture cable network's new daily talk show, titled "It's On with Alexa Chung," premieres at noon on June 15 and expectations are high. The show is taking over the time slot once held by "Total Request Live," or "TRL," the music video countdown show that more or less defined MTV--and in turn, mainstream youth culture--in the late '90s and early '00s. Chung, 25, is a British import who's already solidified a reputation as a quirky TV host across the pond, but is largely unknown in the U.S.

But it's the dual partnerships that MTV has inked with Facebook and Twitter that are really generating buzz. There will be on-screen "tweets," content sourced from Facebook profiles and fan pages, audience contribution from polls to remixed YouTube videos, and round-the-clock updates from Chung's own Twitter account. If it's all done right, "Alexa Chung" could be both a milestone in the convergence between TV and the Web, and a fresh infusion of innovation for a TV network that many say was shooting itself in the foot for not catching onto the social media craze earlier.

Still largely unknown in the U.S., the star of the upcoming "It's On with Alexa Chung" has already established herself as a quirky TV host in Britain.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

"The hope is that (social media) will just be something that is like the air that the show breathes on," said Dave Sirulnick, executive vice president of news and broadcast at MTV. "I think our audience, they'll expect this from us. They're going to expect us to talk to them the way they talk to each other. It's the way they experience the world, you know--it would be odd for us to mount this project, put this up on the air, and not have that happen, you know, because our audience, I don't think they look at it as something that is all new. This is just what they've grown up with."

A decade ago, if you wanted to get a message on MTV, your best bet was probably to write it on a poster and join the cheering crowds outside the network's New York studio during a "TRL" taping, hoping to make your way into the scope of the cameras sweeping overhead. Or if you were really lucky, you could call in and have your telephoned questions asked to celebrity guests on-air.

"In the old days our connection to the outside world on 'TRL' was one person on a phone," said executive producer Tim Healy. "Now with this new show it's definitely increased the scope."

MTV canceled "TRL" earlier this year--some would say belatedly. The network's reputation as a hub of pop-culture influence had long since started to fade: New music was being discovered on MySpace pages and niche music blogs. Popular clips from last night's TV shows were swapped via YouTube and Hulu links in instant messages and posts on Facebook profiles. Youth culture had grown segmented and fragmented with the mass availability of niche "long-tail" content on the Web, and social media had thrown out everyone's old notions of shelf lives--a 10-year-old music video can become an overnight hit on YouTube if enough people start telling their friends about it, whereas fresh Internet fads can be eclipsed and forgotten faster than ever. It seemed that when it came to encapsulating the cool-kid zeitgeist, a live TV show just couldn't cut it in the digital age.

With "Alexa Chung," MTV is making a totally different show. The iconic "TRL" set has been converted into something that looks like a loft apartment, with the studio audience scattered around like party guests. There will be no countdown--rather, a talk show format inspired in part by late-night programming, with topics ranging from movies and music to the latest YouTube sensations (whom Chung plans to regularly bring onto the set to see if their singing, dancing, or other oddball talents are for real). And there will be no screaming crowds in Times Square. Instead, there will be tweets.

The tweet smell of success?
"I think the genius of Twitter is that it's in the second. Not even the moment, it's right now," Sirulnick said. "Instant feedback from the audience, from what's going on, will be on-screen. Whether it's a persistent on-screen feed is something we're toying with right now. We haven't entirely decided."

This won't be MTV's first experiment with Twitter. Nearly two years ago, the network started a Twitter account for the "moon man," the mascot for its annual Video Music Awards, as a promotion for the ceremony. It went largely unnoticed: In the summer of 2007, Twitter was hardly a household term.

Alexa Chung, as pictured atop her Web site.

(Credit: http://www.alexachung.co.uk/)

But after unofficial celebrity endorsements and an appearance on Oprah hurtled Twitter into the mainstream earlier this year, the situation is very different. A firestorm of gossip ensued last week when a report in Variety implied that the company was developing a reality TV series. The rumors got so out of hand that co-founder Biz Stone posted a clarification on the company's official blog: "We're not making a TV show," he wrote.

"That was very frustrating and unfortunate, and a misrepresentation of all sorts of things," Chloe Sladden, Twitter's director of business development for global broadcast and news media, told CNET News several days later.

As it turns out, the Variety report detailed one of a number of partnerships that Twitter is working on with media and entertainment companies. That's Sladden's specialty: she was hired by Twitter this spring, after she spent several years working at Current, the edgy cable news channel co-founded by former vice president Al Gore. While at Current, Sladden worked with Twitter to help supplement its 2008 election coverage with on-screen tweets. Now at Twitter full-time, she's helping media outlets--including, but not limited to MTV--integrate tweets, Twitter searches, trending topics, and the like into their broadcasts.

There's no financial transaction involved in the "Alexa Chung" deal, Sladden said, and that's the way Twitter intends it to be.

"We're trying to unlock the true potential of Twitter, and a lot of our strategy has been to let other folks build a lot of cool stuff on top of Twitter. So the model here is much like the application developers," she explained. When it comes to Twitter's media partnerships, "think of this as a creative API."

MTV's partnership with Facebook is a little more formal, and a little more out-of-the-ordinary for both the social network and MTV. "Whenever they have a celebrity guest, they're exclusively featuring Facebook's presence for that celebrity," said Randi Zuckerberg, who heads up marketing at Facebook (and, yes, is founder Mark Zuckerberg's sister). "Which is really cool. The majority of celebrities have Facebook fan pages right now, with thousands or millions of fans." There will also, of course, be a "fan page" for the show itself, where viewers can submit questions to celebrity guests, vote on which songs they want bands to play when they appear live, and provide general feedback.

But in addition to celebrity fan pages, viewers' own Facebook profile content might pop up on the show. "People in the studio audience will have the opportunity to temporarily 'friend' some of the producers," Zuckerberg said. "Basically, they'll 'friend' them for about two hours, the duration of the show, and then they're going to encourage people to do mobile uploads during the show, mobile status updates, mobile photos, et cetera." For those who aren't in the studio audience, questions for the celebrity guests can be accompanied by Facebook photos or other content.

It's still a touchy issue, considering that a lot of Facebook profile content still isn't public, and many people wouldn't want their party photos splashed all over MTV without very explicit permission. And it's a sharp turn from Facebook's erstwhile hardline attitude of keeping everything behind a login wall, which is why representatives from both companies say that the use of Facebook content on TV will be given the kid-glove treatment.

"Everything's going to be signed off on by the people who are asking the questions," Sirulnick said, adding that MTV has been working with Facebook to finalize and streamline consent procedures. "We're not going to be exposing anybody who has not explicitly agreed to have their material on television. It's important to us, it's important to the audience, it's fair. It's important to Facebook."

MTV + Facebook = ad potential
Unlike the Twitter partnership, this isn't a money-free deal. MTV and Facebook have assembled a joint advertising sales team to sell sponsorship packages that encompass both TV spots and social-media ads.

"A sponsor can have placement on the show, commercials or in-show integration, and also integration on Facebook," explained Randi Zuckerberg, who previously helped orchestrate a partnership with broadcast network ABC during the presidential debates last year. "So, they can do an event RSVP ad for their participation in episodes they're in. They can be integrated into the Facebook page for Alexa's show. There's a lot of great things that they can target to fans of a certain celebrity. We're really going out together and really involving sponsors on both Facebook and TV."

This is big news for the nascent social-network advertising market. Plenty of companies aren't yet comfortable putting ads on the likes of Facebook, having heard the rampant belief that returns aren't good.

MTV's Sirulnick said he sees the joint ad sales strategy as a way for longstanding MTV advertisers to take the plunge into social media, for example, "if Sponsor X is a sponsor of MTV, and has been looking to get into the social-networking space, and has been looking for a window in." But he said that MTV will keep the profits from ads on its own properties, and Facebook will do the same for its site. "The MTV and the Facebook sales teams are out there jointly putting together packages for sales, but it's not a revenue share."

Not everyone in digital media is sure that this hybrid of broadcast television and user-generated social-network content will work.

"As a device every now and then it's OK. When it's persistent, it's annoying," said Jim Louderback, CEO of Web video production company Revision3, when asked about the idea of bringing Twitter and Facebook to broadcast television. "Mixing two mediums together like that doesn't work. You lose what makes each medium work really well, and that's why television on the Web is different from Web TV. That's why WebTV from Microsoft didn't work."

That said, MTV executives say that they're shaping and tweaking "It's On with Alexa Chung" up to the moment it airs, and will continue doing so even after the June 15 debut. The network is clearly excited at this chance to reinvent its brand--and to keep reinventing it, ideally preventing it from growing stale the way "TRL" did.

"It's going to be something that every day we're trying to come up with new things (for)," Sirulnick said. "The folks at Facebook are very excited about this, the folks at Twitter are very excited about this, and the good news is that they get us, they get the audience, they know what works really well on their site. And so it's much more, We're just talking all the time."

Alexa Chung herself appears to be equally excited.

"First guests confirmed for my new show. SO GREAT," she posted to her Twitter account on Wednesday. "America can you watch me please?? Cos my mum doesn't live here."

Updated at 5:53 a.m. PDT: MTV has now settled on an official name for the show: "It's On with Alexa Chung."

Two new members have been added to the fresh lineup of MySpace's executive ranks, following the appointment of CEO Owen Van Natta last week.

Jason Hirschhorn, most recently president of Sling Media Entertainment and before that MTV Networks' chief digital officer, joins MySpace as its chief product officer. He's the second prominent MTV veteran to take on a role at the News Corp.-owned MySpace in the past year, following MySpace Music president Courtney Holt.

Hirschhorn is firmly on the digital-media and entertainment side of things, something that will invariably come into play as MySpace (ideally) restructures itself as an entertainment destination rather than a networking tool. At Sling, he was charged with the development of the SlingPlayer online video aggregator.

The other new MySpace hire comes from a more traditional Silicon Valley background: Michael Jones, who sold his start-up Userplane to AOL in 2006, joins the company as chief operating officer. MySpace is already familiar with Jones' work: it uses Userplane's chat technology for its Web-based chat client, MySpaceIM.

Both will be based in Los Angeles and report directly to Van Natta.

Viacom's MTV Networks has brought some of its television content to Netflix's library of streaming online video, the companies announced Monday.

Yaaaaaaay! SpongeBob is taking over your Netflix account!

(Credit: Nickelodeon)

The offering consists primarily of kids' shows from the Nickelodeon network, with select seasons from the shows "iCarly," "Blue's Clues," "Dora the Explorer," "SpongeBob SquarePants," and a handful of others, as well as the first nine seasons of "South Park," the Comedy Central animated series that you probably don't want your kids watching.

Netflix's streaming-video service still very much takes the back burner to its DVDs-by-mail service, but the company has deals in place with TiVo, Boxee, Microsoft's Xbox, and some HDTV providers.

It's also the second streaming Netflix deal for Viacom, which licensed content from its Logo network last year. Viacom has also signed content deals with Joost (Disclosure: CNET News publisher CBS is an investor in Joost) and NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture Hulu, which now runs episodes of Comedy Central's hit talk shows "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report."

One major player in the video world with which you probably won't see MTV Networks making a deal any time soon: YouTube. Viacom still has an outstanding lawsuit against YouTube parent company Google over infringing content.

We knew the music of the Beatles was coming to the MTV video game Rock Band, but now we have a release date: September 9, 2009. That's when you'll be able to get The Beatles: Rock Band, a new edition of the game for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii consoles. You can start working on your bad "lonely hearts club band" puns now.

The game itself will retail for $59.99 in the U.S.; there will also be a $99.99 version that comes with Beatles-inspired guitar controllers, and a $249.99 "special edition" bundle. I'm guessing that one comes with a walrus.

The date is awfully cute, considering the Beatles' formally self-titled "White Album" contains that song called "Revolution 9," which consists largely of a repetition of the phrase "number nine, number nine, number nine." Conspiracy theorists say that if you play it backward it sounds like "turn me on, dead man" and is hence one of the clues that adds up to reveal that Paul McCartney died and was replaced by a lookalike early in the band's career.

But here's something else for conspiracy theorists of a different variety. September 9, 2009, happens to be a Wednesday in early September, and Apple has historically held iPod-related announcements on Tuesdays in early September. If you want to be mega-speculative, consider that there could be an announcement that week that in addition to Rock Band, the Beatles would finally be coming to iTunes. The band's catalog is currently not legally available for digital download.

There have been legal issues and general animosity for years between Apple Inc. and Apple Corps, the publisher of the Beatles' music. When record label EMI, which owns the rights to the Beatles catalog, inked a deal with Apple to make its catalog available on iTunes without DRM, buzz circulated that the Beatles could be added to the digital-media emporium soon. It's been almost two years, and no Fab Four yet. Late last year, ex-Beatle Paul McCartney said that talks had stalled. There's no real gauge on where things stand now.

But I guess you could just try playing a Steve Jobs keynote backward and see what hidden messages surface.

Update at 7:59 a.m. PST: A RealNetworks representative quashes a rumor about a RealNetworks-MTV joint venture.

The long-expected layoffs at Viacom, parent company of MTV Networks, have finally taken place.

According to an internal memo (first leaked to gossip blog Gawker), 850 positions have been cut. That amounts to 7 percent of the company's workforce.

"Our advantages and best efforts can't completely protect Viacom from the very serious and broad-based challenges of this economic recession," CEO Philippe Dauman wrote in the e-mail. "Viacom's long-term health will depend on our shared commitment to adapt, to innovate and to make difficult choices. To compete and thrive, we need to create an organization and a cost structure that are in step with the evolving economic environment."

A press release Thursday from Viacom gave a more detailed explanation: "The restructuring and write-down together will result in a pre-tax charge of $400 million to $450 million, or $0.42 to $0.48 per diluted share, in the fourth quarter of 2008. These staffing and compensation actions and write-downs are expected to result in pre-tax savings of $200 million to $250 million in 2009."

It's been common knowledge that Viacom layoffs were on the way, and the company had already canceled its big holiday parties this year, giving employees two extra vacation days in exchange.

In addition to MTV, Viacom owns BET Networks and Paramount Pictures. Its cable channels include Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, VH1, and Noggin.

According to a separate post on Gawker, the New York office for MTV-RealNetworks joint venture Rhapsody America is rumored to have closed, leaving 25 people jobless. RealNetworks spokesman Ryan Luckin said in an e-mail to me on Thursday that the rumor is false.

(Credit: Howcast Media)

Facebook, Google, and the Google-owned YouTube are among the sponsors for the Alliance of Youth Movements Summit, an event taking place at New York's Columbia Law School from December 3-5.

Along with other collaborators--which include the U.S. Department of State, MTV, Access 360 Media, and start-up Howcast--the event hopes to "find (the) best ways to use digital media to promote freedom and justice, and counter violence, extremism, and oppression."

The companies have amassed 17 leaders of different activist groups and hope to bring them together to come up with a common set of principles and strategies, inspired by a movement against a Colombian extremist group that was formed and organized on Facebook.

"Aided by social-networking technologies, the organization inspired 12 million people in 190 cities around the world to take to the streets in protest against the FARC, an extremist group that has been terrorizing Colombia for more than 40 years," an announcement of the summit read. "The magnitude of the marches illustrated once and for all that the FARC lacked a strong support base. Within days of the protests, the FARC witnessed massive desertions from their ranks."

Speakers at next month's summit include Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz, actress and talk show host Whoopi Goldberg, and State Department Undersecretary James K. Glassman.

The State Department has already partnered with YouTube for its "Democracy Challenge," a moviemaking competition in conjunction with several film schools. And in the wake of the 2008 presidential election, Facebook has been stepping up its activism and outreach efforts; earlier this fall, it sponsored the ServiceNation summit.

A new kind of video advertising is coming to MySpace.

The company has partnered with a video advertising company, Auditude, and Viacom's MTV Networks division, to bring Auditude's video ads to MTV content on the News Corp.-owned social network's MySpaceTV video hub.

Here's how Auditude works: it can detect MTV Networks content if either MTVN itself or a MySpace user uploads it, and then it implements both targeted ads and "attribution ads," which provide data about the source of the programming. (For example: an "attribution ad" for Comedy Central talk show The Colbert Report could include information about when the program is broadcast on-air.)

Right now, according to a joint release, Auditude already has four years' worth of 100 television channels indexed in its database, plus 250 million standalone videos.

"As one of the leading providers of online video in the world, we give our fans the power not only to consume our content, but also to share and interact with it across the Web," Mika Salmi, president of global digital media at MTV Networks, said in a release. "With Auditude's solution, we can continue to give users the freedom to take our content wherever they go online, while ensuring that we can monetize it as well."

This is a bit of a surprise coming from Viacom, which sued Google's YouTube over the distribution of pirated content. MySpace has reason to feel jilted by YouTube, too--it's no secret that News Corp. had been interested in acquiring YouTube, which can credit a big part of its rise to embedded videos on MySpace profiles, before Google outbid it.

Auditude says that its technology is compatible with YouTube, as well as Veoh, AOL Video, Dailymotion, and others.

But despite Viacom's beef with YouTube, content from MTV Networks can be viewed on a number of partner sites, like Imeem and Veoh, and episodes of Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report are available on Hulu, the joint video venture between NBC Universal and News Corp.

MTV Networks also recently launched MTVMusic.com, a compendium of the longstanding pop-culture brand's music videos.

Pop singer Rick Astley had a huge hit with "Never Gonna Give You Up" 20 years ago. Now he's had a second wave of fame--and according to a fan site, it will culminate in a performance at MTV Europe's "EMA" ceremony, which takes place on November 6.

The campy, hip-wiggling video for "Never Gonna Give You Up" enjoyed newfound popularity when it became the center of the "Rickrolling" phenomenon--the sharing of a link that purported to be something else but was actually a link to the Astley video as hosted on YouTube. The craze was declared "totally over" after a surfeit of Rickrolls on April Fool's Day, but it kept going strong--one of the most high-profile gags involving the song was when pranksters flooded an online poll for the New York Mets' eighth-inning sing-along with "Never Gonna Give You Up."

The EMA awards, which are the equivalent of the U.S.'s MTV Video Music Awards, feature a "Best Act Ever" award, chosen by popular vote rather than judges, and it's been well-known for a while that Astley is the front-runner. Rumor has it, per an Astley fan site set up specifically for the "Best Act Ever" campaign, that not only will the British singer accept his award at the EMA event, he'll perform as well.

Astley's official Web site confirmed several weeks ago that he had been invited to appear at the ceremony (but not necessarily perform), and that the singer would give it "serious consideration." If the more recent rumors are any indicator, that "serious consideration" has amounted to a "yes."

A correction was made at 1:47 p.m. PT on Thursday. Astley's official Web site says he was invited to appear at the ceremony, but does not mention actually performing.