ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, July 14, 1996 TAG: 9607120014
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BILL CARTER N.Y. TIMES NEWS SERVICE
One of the cable television's defining networks, MTV, has decided to create a spin-off music channel called M2, focused more tightly on music and aimed at a slightly older audience.
The channel, which MTV has quietly planned for several months, is scheduled to start Aug. 1, the 15th anniversary of the original channel. It is intended almost as a ``flip side'' of MTV, with a somewhat wider mix of music genres and groups that is less dependent on major hits. The target audience is perhaps 23 years old, instead of 21.
``This is a channel like MTV was in 1981,'' said Tom Freston, the chairman of MTV Networks. ``The audience we're going for with M2 doesn't watch a lot of MTV. They find it a bit too mainstream.''
Judy McGrath, the president of MTV Music Television, a subsidiary of Viacom Inc., said: ``If you're an MTV fan, you like all the stuff that's on MTV. You like all the junk pop cultural stuff. That's how you know who you are and what to wear and what you're like. But there's another MTV viewer who says you don't need to tell me what's cool. Just put it in front of me.''
It will also be the first cable channel with a 24-hour link to computer users. Through the service, which is called Intercast, viewers will be able to see M2 on computer monitors as well as television sets. The computer version will include a regular stream of related information - from concert dates to where a certain band might have had dinner the night before - accompanying each music video.
MTV executives say the M2 concept has been presented to a limited number of traditional cable operators, like Comcast and Continental Cablevision, and advertisers, like PepsiCo and MCI, and has been received with enthusiasm.
At the outset, M2 will have extremely limited distribution over cable systems, reaching perhaps as few as 1 million homes. ``I think the best place to see us at first will be a digital satellite dish in the middle of South Dakota,'' Ms. McGrath said.
Yet MTV executives express confidence that the channel will grow quickly. ``Word of mouth is what sold us 15 years ago,'' Freston said. At that time, the catch-phrase, ``I want my MTV,'' became a rallying cry for wider distribution of the new channel.
In keeping with this reverence for the power of word of mouth, the new channel opted for the simpler name M2, rather than MTV2. ``Like MSNBC, MTV2 just seemed hard to say,'' Freston said, referring to the Microsoft-NBC new cable service.
Other cable service providers, of course, have created spinoffs to stand alongside their traditional networks. The most successful are Turner Broadcasting's Headline News, and ABC's ESPN2. MTV had previously created VH1, but that was specifically targeted to viewers who liked older rock music.
To underscore the concept for the channel, the B side of MTV, the network's promotional department came up with the idea of reversing the familiar MTV logo so that it looks exactly as it would from the back, with a small number 2 inserted in one leg of the M, and the words ``music television'' written under it in reverse.
The promotions were created by Abby Terkuhle, MTV's creative director, and Nigel Cox-Hagen, the producer of on-air promotions.
MTV is looking for buzz among its core audience of young viewers, rather than payments to cable operators, to push the channel. Many programmers with new channels, like Fox with its news channel and even MTV itself with its new TV Land channel, have been offering cash payments to get onto cable systems.
Freston said M2 would try a different strategy: The channel will be offered to operators without charge. ``We're not going to charge for the service for the foreseeable future,'' he said. ``The upside is advertising.''
Actually, MTV says it will even eat the advertising revenues for a year; expecting tiny initial audiences, it will not attempt to sell the channel to advertisers until next summer, Freston said.
Advertisers have always supported MTV because its audience, while never large on a regular basis, is so purely a young group that it is rarely reached as well by any other outlet.
``We reach 40 to 45 percent of young Americans,'' Freston said. ``That's why our audience is so desirable to advertisers. And the audience for the new channel, which we think will include a lot of opinion leaders, will be especially coveted.''
MTV's economies of scale make the start-up costs for the channel extremely low, Freston said. He said it would take very few employees to get the channel started.
The MTV music programming staff held meetings last week to plan the music rotation for M2; the MTV promotion staff met to discuss plans to create an identity for M2. Many videos used on the channel will come from MTV's enormous video library.
Freston declined to cite a specific start-up cost for the channel, but he said it would be easily absorbable.
``We've been growing in revenues by 20 to 30 percent for the last six years,'' he said.
MTV has become this successful partly by evolving from its original music-video program format into a wider pop cultural meeting place for teen-age and young-adult viewers.
MTV has received some criticism from music purists for augmenting its music format with entertainment programming like the documentary series ``The Real World'' and the game show ``Singled Out.'' Both are extremely popular, but the MTV executives acknowledged that true music aficionados probably are not fans.
The network's executives perceived that a new channel could be carved out of a return of sorts to MTV's music-pure roots.
They cited the number of music sites on the Internet, 72,000 at their last count, as evidence that there is so much passion for pure music-oriented material that MTV does not have to cannibalize its own audience to build a new channel.
MTV intends to do just that: put M2 in front of viewers. ``We almost have a non-marketing strategy,'' Freston said. The company expects to establish an identity for the new channel by relying on its creative promotional staff, whom which Freston called ``the heart and soul of this company.''
They already have plans to brand the new channel as the next cool thing, taking the flip-side idea to such lengths as playing the MTV theme music backwards and creating images of the underside of everything, like eggs over easy.
``This is how we play against the big boys, against all those other networks out there'' Freston said. ``We create a personality. By the time we're through, M2 will have a personality that everybody will recognize.''
LENGTH: Long : 118 linesby CNB