More and more television networks are working hard to embrace
the
Internet and everything it offers.
A lot of them seem to be diligently
working away on plans to grab a piece of the huge viewer on the web.
Viacom’s MTV
Networks
has kept itself ahead of the pack, being one of the first networks to
offer full episodes of its television programming online for free,
through MTV Overdrive.
Now, the company has much broader plans as it prepares to
launch two
dozen new websites by the first quarter of 2008, with many shows
getting their own exclusive sites.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
In today’s news from The
Hollywood Reporter, Comedy Central’s ”
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” is one of the headline shows
which will receive a new website, TheDailyShow.com,
to be launched by the end of 2007.
The upcoming site is set to feature
each night’s full episode an hour or two after it airs and an
impressive archive of the entire video history of The Daily
Show.
Other television shows scheduled to receive new sites include
”
South Park,”
“The Sarah Silverman Program,” ”
Engaged and Under-age” and Nickelodeon’s “iCarly.”
The idea behind the plan is that, with individual sites for
its
programming, MTV can offer an expanded variety of content and subject
matter that is relevant to each site’s focus.
The president of global digital media at MTV Networks,
Mika Salmi stated:
“Consumers, on the whole, use search to find what they want
on the
Web”“By having these verticals, we work well with that type of
behaviour. We see a lot of time spent and people getting deeper into the
experience.”“We’re accelerating it across the company. It’s worked very
well
and advertisers like it because they can expand their reach in a very
targeted manner.”
Conclusions
When it’s all said and done, MTV Networks will own a total of
more
than 300 web sites, which should be quite a task to manage and keep
track of.
In addition to the sites for shows, expect to see a teenage
girl
gaming site, a video game cheat/hint site, and niche sites including VH1 Eye Candy,
which is already undergoing beta testing but has yet to be publicly
launched.
Michael Garrett is a contributing author discussing the social networking world, his work can be found on Profy.com
