Last week MTV announced that they'll be taking steps to encourage consumers to not only watch but also mash-up video content on a series of targeted video portals (thousands of them, actually) that the network plans to build expressly for this purpose. I shrugged and swore I wouldn't get worked up, but over the past handful of days some smart social media experts have been singing MTV's praises (CK, Ben McConnell, Digitasian Jeff Flemings.)
Well, either they're all missing something or I am.
I'll give MTV this (and here I agree with everyone I've cited above): they're smart to recognize that they (any media company, really) can no longer be the lone arbiter of youth culture. That privilege belongs to the youth themselves, so ceding some level of control to the audience is clearly a step in the right direction.
Then what's my problem? MTV may be allowing consumers to tweak their content, but they've actually missed an important piece of the puzzle. Consumer control isn't just about what people want to do, it's also about where, when and how people want to do it. And for the YouTube generation, "where" generally means outside the network's own walled garden (yes, even outside the network's thousands of niche walled gardens.) The new sites may not be the MTV.com flagship destination, but they are still walled garden destinations operated by the network.
According to MSNBC (cited up top), MTV's new digital president Mika Salmi says that the good news is, "We're where people want to be." Well, um, no actually. People clearly want to be at YouTube or they wouldn't have uploaded MTV video clips into that service in the first place.
So to me, this is a matter of the old guard seeking to re-exert some control over consumer creativity, even if the effort is dressed up in the new guard's uniform. In other words: it's OK to get creative with our proprietary content, provided you do it under our watchful eye.
Rather than simply moving the walls that surround their garden, MTV (or really any mainstream media company) should be trying to figure out effective ways to monetize their content no matter where it turns up online. Even if it turns up outside their controlled environments.
So yes, MTV, you've taken a step in the right direction. But no, you're nowhere near the end of the path.
