MTV has reinvented itself more times than Neil Young and Arianna Huffington combined. In The NYT, David Carr ponders the future of the Viacom-owned, once-dominant cultural touchstone, now at the crossroads at the ripe old age of 25. Carr walks through the various milestones in the history of what was once called Music Television and looks at how it expanded and invented new genres of television (particularly reality). But the meat of the article is considering what comes next. Carr does some prognosticating, as do the people he interviews. Most interesting is how the importance of digital media is implicit in almost everyone’s words. Christina Norman, MTV’s president, acknowledges, “our viewers are telling us that they want an experience beyond linear television” and points to the web game Virtual Laguna Beach as an outside-the-cable-box success for MTV. The recent layoffs at MTV Networks have been portrayed as an attempt to move more resources into Net-related endeavors. And then there’s OK Go, the band that garnered attention via its treadmill video on YouTube but, according to Norman, didn’t start garnering significant record sales until it appeared on MTV. Carr concludes: “clanging the death knell on MTV has been a hobby for media observers as long as the music channel has existed, but when the smoke cleared, those three letters were still there.”
Related:
—MTV Experiments With Virtual Reality TV
—MTV Layoffs Include Senior Execs
—MTV’s McGrath to Staff: Many Organizations Are Adapting