Viacom’s Mika Salmi runs MTV Networks, he was acq-hired in the $200M Atom Entertainment acquisition. He has a penchant for animated content, naturally, but he does have a great vantage point in what Viacom is up to in terms of creation and distribution online.
The company does like to create a lot of communities around their content on their own sites. They partner with many third party sites, too, but you get a sense that those are secondary to Viacom’s own sites.
The elephant in the room remains YouTube, whom Salmi’s boss Sumner Redstone is suing. Salmi clarifies that the company is open to YouTube deal, but it’s not a commercial relationship in the sense that YouTube did not have a clear financial proposition to make, and that it was mainly speculative. Yes, this is my extrapolation of what was said…
Like News Corp.’s Fox Interactive Media, Viacom’s digital revenues will come in at the $500M range in 2007, trailing News Corp., but “not my much”. See who is king of digital media here, for a more complete rundown.
Salmi seemed to think that we will have to soon see the outcome of the line between TV and Web become less blurry: “will there be Wifi, or a CPU in TV?”
When asked if the writers’ strike will become a tipping point, Salmi is quick to say no, but does suggest that the web is a sandbox for potential TV ideas.
More to come.
Tags: Viacom, Video, YouTube|
Posted By: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan | Nov 14th
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