MTV's reality show "Laguna Beach: the Real OC" has been an interesting experiment in "scripted" reality television. Clever editing and a pushy production staff enable MTV to make the mundane lives of
spoiled rich kids in Southern California look like glamorous soap operas. Perhaps that formula is losing steam after three seasons, as MTV is expected to launch an extension of its Laguna Beach brand
this week to the virtual world of online avatars. "You can not only watch TV, but now you can actually live it," a peppy-sounding Van Toffler, the president of the MTV Networks Music, Film and Logo
Group, said in an interview. Wednesday's introduction of "Virtual Laguna Beach" is the first of three virtual worlds MTV is planning over the next year as part of an attempt to win back its core user
base from YouTube and MySpace. Another of the online worlds planned, called VMTV, will be a music destination where visitors can club hop among neighborhoods, buy music, watch videos, sing karaoke and
even start their own bands. LogoWorld, the third--an extension of Logo, MTV's gay and lesbian TV channel--will be designed entirely by its participants. It will be interesting to see how MTV's
aggressive move into an area dominated by hardcore computer geeks plays out with mainstream consumers. Some virtual online worlds, like the Sims Online, Second Life and There.com, have been enormously
successful, attracting hundreds of thousands of users. One of the major appeals of these worlds, aside from subscription revenue--the revenue model is unclear--is the possibility of ad revenue.
Virtual Laguna Beach already has trial ad partnerships with Cingular, Pepsi-Cola, Secret and Viacom company Paramount.
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