Giants awaken to Internet

Summer Redstone, executive chairman of split entities Viacom and CBS, sees growth in Internet ventures. Ho hum.

From Reuters:

"We see great opportunities with the Internet. We may have been slow to begin with for reasons I don't want to go into right now, but we are moving very fast now, as you know. Viacom recently bought NeoPets.com, it's bought iFilm and of course (video game chat service) Xfire, which I think will be explosive in its growth," Redstone said. "So we're on the case. Each company is on the case."

MTV and Microsoft Corp are j oining forces to compete against Apple Computer Inc's market-dominating iTunes music download service, Redstone said.

"It's not (compatible with Apple) and I see some significant advantages (to that)... the fact that this (music download service) appears on every Microsoft Windows makes it so powerful that it will be a very, very strong competitor," he said.

Viacom, owner of MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, split with CBS at the end of last year, separating its faster growing cable networks and newly purchased DreamWorks movie studio from the slower growing television broadcasting and radio operations.

Redstone admitted that its movie unit Paramount had some "rough times recently" but a resurgence was taking place with the injection of DreamWorks. He claimed CBS's outdoor business, such as billboards, was going very strongly and that TV was doing extremely well.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp had paid more for teen Web site myspace.com than Viacom would have been willing, he said.

MORE.