MTV videos to be available to all Internet users

By Kenneth Li

NEW YORK (Reuters) - You won't find clips of comedian Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" and MTV's "Pimp My Ride" on YouTube any more, but Viacom Inc. is laying the groundwork for its videos to be available to hundreds of thousands of other sites.

In the next few months, Web users will be able to grab videos from nearly all MTV-owned sites and post them on their own blogs or Web sites, lessening the need to go to YouTube (http://www.youtube.com), the top online video service that Google Inc. acquired last year.

Viacom, owner of MTV Networks and the Paramount movie studio, had been planning for this move months before it demanded earlier this month that YouTube remove more than 100,000 unauthorized Viacom video clips from its site, after failing to reach a distribution deal.

"We need to open up our Web sites and content both for consumers and for other companies," Mika Salmi, MTV Networks president of global digital media, said in an interview last Friday.

The move is part of a strategy to bring Viacom's Web sites up to "Web 2.0" standards, Salmi said. "Part of that is allowing people to take our content and embed it and make your own things out of it, whatever they want," he said.

MTV, once the arbiter of cool for hip young viewers, is now playing catch-up to online social networks like News Corp.'s MySpace. MTV had tried to buy MySpace, but lost out to Rupert Murdoch, leading to the ouster of Viacom's chief executive.

STAYING RELEVANT

Viacom has not ruled out a deal with YouTube yet, while analysts say the dust-up is mere negotiating tactic. But Viacom also sees staying relevant to a new generation of media consumers as a top priority. To do so, they are borrowing ideas from the very companies they compete against.