Interview: Van Toffler, President & Jason Hirschhorn, Chief Digital Officer; MTV Networks Group

Van TofflerJason Hirschhorn[By Staci D. Kramer] After venue changes at CTIA, Van Toffler, Jason Hirschhorn and I wound up being led through wending passages in the Las Vegas Convention Center to a location that delighted them, especially Toffler: a glass-walled conference room with a panoramic, overhead view of the show floor. What followed was the same kind of view of MTV as the two spoke candidly (ok, there’s a fair amount of boasting, too) about the evolution of the programmer’s three-screen strategy, the real effect of the success of AOL’s Live 8 production, the speed with which MTV moved into mobile globally, and plans including off-site social networking and probable IM partnership(s). What follows are edited excerpts; for the full experience, listen to the audio.
In some respects you’re further ahead, I think, on wireless than online. Hirschhorn: I wouldn’t characterize it that way. … A lot of the infrastructure and programming and ideas we built for online allowed us to move into wireless very quickly. I think it’s fair to say we were slower to pick up to broadband and online than we were to wireless. I think we’re very mature in terms of building great products and programming for the Internet and maybe we were finding our way as a company … But the minute that wireless content — and specifically 3G — took hold around the world we had learned our lessons from maybe slower, indecisive movement on the Internet in the earlier years and didn’t let that happen on mobile. That shows itself in something like 67 carrier deals around the world, I think leading the birth of 3g video with most of our brands, more mobile television networks than anyone else, moire than any media company in the U.S., and, specifically, the infrastructure that we had built out, the database stuff, how we stored our content, the programming that we were doing for broadband, that stuff moved very well to the phone so it made it look like we were instantaneous. Toffler: We were probably slow investing online but online was a text-based medium; we didn’t know what we brought to it that was unique and once it became more visual and broadband penetration achieved a certain level and we could create compelling visual content the way we can with 3G technology, it’s kind of like a light switch went off and our company said, ‘Let’s go create really cool stuff.’

To the outside world, Live 8 looked like a wake-up call of sorts. What kind of wake-up call was it inside? What did it change? What did it tell you about the way people were willing to experience an event like that? Toffler: It was a signal to us that if we were going to present a global music event we needed to do it on all screens — not just TV, but broadband, the internet and wirelessly. There was so much happening simultaneously you couldn’t possibly pout it all on one screen. It kind of proved to us that if you use all of the screens seamlessly, simultaneously, you can capture more eyeballs and present an event in many different ways that allows people to personalize and customize their experience. Hirschhorn: (MTV) Overdrive had already been launched, the My VMAs, which people thought was an answer to Live 8 had already been planned so it’s interesting how the outside world takes it. Had Live 8 not been on the Internet I don’t know that we would have had a lot of complaints about it because we shot it the way we’ve shot music for a long time รข

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