SATELLITE & CABLE: MTV gearing up for growth from SE Asia

MTV Asia has enhanced its localised services in Asia with the rolling out of the Philippines feed in addition to its current Southeast Asia, Mandarin, Korea and India feeds. MTV Networks Asia president Frank Brown said Southeast Asia has "great growth potential", now that it has recovered from the economic upheavals of the late 1990s. The music network has appointed Peter Bullard to oversee the Southeast Asia region, with the support of general managers in markets like the Philippines and Indonesia. "We are increasing the weight on management to expand their potential and we may take people form Singapore to other Southeast Asia markets," said Mr Brown. MTV will deliver a 24-hour service in the Philippines in addition to the extending distribution on terrestrial station, ABS CBN. Reaching more than 110 million households across Asia, Mr Brown said MTV was taking on a "more decentralised and localised" programming strategy in the region. Digitalisation technology enables the multi-feeds strategy with affordable operation costs. Mr Brown noted "it didn't make sense to invest in infrastructure and equipment" many years ago as the network is doing today. Advertising sales for MTV has grown 60 per cent in the first quarter of this year, according to Mr Brown, who added that the network has doubled the size of its business over the past two years. Local advertising has grown significantly over the past year with the proportion increasing to two-thirds of the total from a third. But international advertisers tended to be more active following the economic crisis, with increasing marketing budgets being allocated across the region. On the Internet platform, MTV plans to launch an Indian website this year and current page views for MTV Asia online were more than 11 million. Current advertisers on board for MTV's online services include: Cadbury and Compaq in China, Asiana Air in Korea, Kenzo, Smint, Citizen, Heineken, Motorola, Philips and Sony in Singapore, and Acer, Estee Lauder, Intel, M&M, Pioneer, Kenzo and Za in Taiwan. The music industry is undergoing tremendous change, including in marketing, with the emergence of interactive media platforms to deliver services. MTV is leveraging its online resources to promote the channel and plans to "experiment on ecommerce", according to Mr Brown.

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