MTV still looking to become the MTV of the Internet

Found on Techdirt on Thursday, 10 August 2006
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While Fox was gobbling up all the hot properties, MTV was pretty much caught napping. Earlier this year, they tried to talk a good game about how they were uniquely poised to be the "MTV of the online world," but their vision of the world was uniquely old media. Rather than understanding that the internet is about communication and interaction, they claimed it was all about "video," which they had more of than anyone else. Then, rather than realizing that everyone at the company needed to "think digitally" they assigned that task to one guy -- who quickly discovered that without any real power, no one else was thinking digitally and the whole strategy failed.

Today, though, they took another step by buying Atom Entertainment, another video site that's been around for years, but never could figure out how to become YouTube. Again, it's the same "old media" thinking at MTV. Atom is much more about distribution of video than about sharing and interacting with video. Until MTV recognizes that the internet isn't just television with a mouse, they're going to have difficulty being "the MTV of the internet."

Wasn't the M for music? In the past years, MTV changed from a music sender to a ringtone station; ads and uninteresting shows are on most of the time. I can't imagine it will take over the Internet music world. It really lost it's value back when Ray Cokes left.