Valleywag
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jackpot
Rock Band creators get $300 million rock-star bonus
Eran Egozy and Alex Rigopulos, the MIT-educated creators of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, have earned a $150 million bonus from Viacom, whose MTV unit bought the game. The pair are on track to earn an even bigger bonus in 2009. (Photo by Newsweek/John Huet) -
online advertising
Viacom turns MySpace bootlegs into an advertunity
A year ago, Viacom sued YouTube for one billion dollars, claiming YouTube was not blocking uploads of copyrighted Viacom material from Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, MTV, VH1 and others. Today, MySpace will join YouTube in running ads targeted to Viacom-owned clips, instead of deleting them. Auditude, a Palo Alto startup, provides the software that identifies Viacom-owned content. Remember when musicians believed all advertising was evil? Now, I'm looking forward to seeing a Big & Rich ad targeted against another Big & Rich ad, overlaid by another Big & Rich ad for a Big & Rich ad I haven't seen yet. Collect them all! -
digital music
MTV Music too little, too late -- except for one thing
Imagine a website where you can view every music video known to man. Yes, that's what MTV.com should have been 10 years ago. Now that MTVmusic.com exists, what is it good for? Oh yes: A whole new way to rickroll your friends. -
With plans for Flux, MTV dreams of restored relevancy
Viacom subsidiary MTV Networks acquired the rest of software company Social Project, which runs Flux, a platform for social networks. Flux links together sites and gives them social features like messaging and video sharing. MTV already owned a large stake in the company and had 35 sites on the platform. MTV plans to turn Flux into an ad network because "the Web is fragmented,” says Mika Salmi, MTV's president of global digital media. “People are attracted to niches. We have a history in the cable business of going after niches.” True enough: Online, MTV has a history of turning what should be successful, mainstream ventures into mere niches.
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Next Establishment
Once again, Vanity Fair leaves geeks at the kids' power table
Preeminent among the magazine world's kingmaking power lists is Vanity Fair's New Establishment, which appears in the October issue — on newsstands in L.A. and New York today, but not in the Bay Area for another six days. Silicon Valley gets similar short shrift: The names who make it there are predictable bigs like Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, or Hollywood-crossover types like Jeff Skoll, eBay's first employee turned movie producer. Walt Mossberg, now employed by New Establishment perennial Rupert Murdoch, also squeaked in. The consolation prize Vanity Fair offers: Its "Next Establishment" list, reserved for the likes of Twitter's Ev Williams. It's a marvelous piece of New York media trickery — flatter the geeks by making them feel included, but corral them into a side room so the real power brokers aren't offended by comparison. True, the "Next Establishment" suggests that these are people who might matter in the future. But in saying that, Vanity Fair's editors are also sending the message that right here, right now, its "Next" nominees are nobodies. On this year's list: More » -
MTV launches another surely doomed music service
MTV is continuing its push into digital music, despite its long litany of failures in the past, by introducing a music recommendation service and social network called Soundtrack. Most of the song recommendations will be based off of MTV's list of shows such as The Hills, Shot at Love, and G's to Gents. RealNetworks' Rhapsody, which recently dropped copyright protections on its music files, will help MTV sell those songs, as well — though a tipster reports Rhapsody been having customer service and outage issues for weeks.
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great moments in pr
5 questions Viacom doesn't want Valleywag to ask Philippe Dauman
Touchy Viacom flack Jeremy Zweig called Valleywag up to let us know personally that we'd been disinvited from next week's press-only screening of Tropic Thunder. Such a pity! Because we had a list of questions we were going to ask Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman: More » -
David Verklin
Meet the man who has to save cable
Ad money is flying onto the Web. While it hasn't hurt cable TV yet — that business is still seeing a migration of ad dollars from the broadcast networks — Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Cablevison, Charter and Brighthouse Networks are worried it could. So together, they've created Canoe Ventures, and hired ad-agency veteran David Verklin as CEO. His mission: Convince cable programmers like Walt Disney's ESPN or Viacom's MTV to adopt advertising technology that will automatically place cable commercials, like Internet ads are targeted today. More » -
your privacy is an illusion
Hacker steals 5,000 MTV employees' private data
A hacker infiltrated MTV's computers and accessed data included 5,000 employees' names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers and salaries. "We are taking every appropriate action to investigate this incident and to protect you and the company in future," read a companywide email obtained by the WSJ. One-word version: Punk'd! -
exclusive
CollegeHumor and MTV make like Jake and Amir
The deal isn't official yet, but CollegeHumor and MTV plan to launch a TV show together. In the finished pilot, the Tumblr-popular Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld host, rolling clips between skits like the one in the clip below. Sam Reich plays College Humor cofounder Ricky Van Veen. Word has it CollegeHumor insisted on getting online distribution rights and that MTV readily complied. More »
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San Francisco, 11:02 AM
Sun Nov 23
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