LOS ANGELES -- The head of MTV's Net unit has a theory: It ain't the Web site with the best tech that wins, it's the Web site that can build the biggest brand the fastest.
Yeah, sounds familiar. But given that MTV's parent company, Viacom, is about to join CBS to become the world's biggest promotional machine, Nicholas Butterworth has a good feeling that his sites are gonna win.
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The 163 radio stations owned by CBS subsidiary Infinity Broadcasting will fortify MTV's already wide market. The MTV cable channel reaches hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide.
It stands to reach many more if the proposed merger between parent Viacom and CBS goes through, said Butterworth, CEO of MTVi, in a keynote address at the Digital Coast conference.
The proposed merger holds promise for "dramatically increased promotional activities" for MTVi, he said. Sumner Redstone, chairman of Viacom, has already discussed the possibility of an IPO for MTVi.
Formed a week ago, MTVi includes Viacom's Internet music assets, sonicnet.com, mtv.com, and vh1.com. MTVi is 90 percent owned by MTV; Liberty Media owns the remaining 10 percent.
MTVi plans to cross-promote these assets in a variety of media -- from TV ads to music videos -- to solidify MTV's position as the best-known music brand on the Web, Butterworth said.
Smaller sites like MP3.com will play a critical role in driving the adoption of new music technologies on the Web. But sites like mtv.com, with established brand names and audiences, will continue to draw the lion's share of visitors seeking music content, he said.
That's at least partly because MTV can easily promote mtv.com and other affiliate sites during TV shows such as its upcoming music video awards. Many MTV watchers simultaneously surf MTV's Web site to get additional information, Butterworth noted. The key to success for brands like MTVi will be ubiquity. It's not enough to have people surfing the Web in their living rooms; MTVi also seeks to capture them at work.
Next month a relaunched VH1.com will provide exactly that kind of programming.
"Ubiquity is a big asset," Butterworth said. "When people turn on the TV, they expect to see VH1." MTV is also focused on expanding its 15 foreign Web sites to tap the international market for MTV's product.
Simply being big, however, doesn't ensure success, as the decline of brands like Prodigy and Interfilm indicate.
"Size doesn't matter in the long term," Butterworth said. "Growth does. If you don't grow, you're dead."
In keeping with reaching the broadest possible audience, MTVi plans to make money through advertising, promotion, and e-commerce, rather than charging subscription fees. Ultimately, Butterworth said, a company's success or failure on the Web will be determined by whether it is able to exploit its existing media assets effectively, not by whether it's using the latest technology.
"The challenge isn't so much whether you're an Internet company or a traditional media company, it's how you put the pieces together so that it's additive. Technology in and of itself isn't cool," he said.
Behram Antia, president and CEO of Planetville, a Vancouver, BC-based aggregator of broadcast video content on the Web, agreed that traditional big media will have a big advantage over new Internet startups.
"Traditional media [companies] have a major advantage in the Internet space because of their long history of providing content, their marketing expertise, and their distribution capabilities," he said.
He said that his company is seeking partnerships with all the major networks.
