• by Shankar Gupta , September 29, 2006

MTV plans a special Web-only finale for the football reality show "Two-A-Days." The episode will post on MTV.com immediately after the TV airing of the last regular broadcast episode of the season.

"Two-A-Days"--a reality show that follows the progress of a high-intensity high school football program throughout its season--already is widely available online, on MTV's streaming video site, MTV Overdrive, and downloadable on iTunes. The Web-only episode will focus on what happened to the players after the last game of the season.

The move appears to be part of MTV's continuing efforts to develop its Web presence, which lags behind sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com. MTV.com drew just 8.4 million unique visitors last month, compared to 55.7 million at MySpace.com and 14.7 million at Facebook.com, according to comScore. MTV also saw its August traffic shrink by 4 percent from the year before, while MySpace grew by 156 percent and Facebook grew by 79 percent. MTV did not return calls for comment for this article.

MTV has made a host of recent acquisitions also aimed at building its online traffic, including the purchases of video game developer Harmonix last week, and online entertainment company Atom Entertainment in August, as well as parent company Viacom's May acquisition of gaming social networking service Xfire.

Other TV networks this year have also stepped up efforts to boost their online audience by streaming shows on the Web. This season, Yahoo offered streams of the new CBS show "Jericho" and NBC's "Heroes" before their air dates, while MSN debuted three shows from The CW Network--"Runaway," "Everybody Hates Chris" and "Veronica Mars"--one week before their air dates, and AOL Webcast two new fall NBC series, the sitcom "Twenty Good Years" and Aaron Sorkin's "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," one week before their first air dates.