"We have replaced MTV," MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson said flatly in a recent interview with the German paper Der Spiegel. That bold statement comes just a day after MTV announced its flagship program, "Total Request Live," may be canceled due to the gradual decline of its ratings. Indeed, MTV, once the undisputed king of teen and 20something content, is finding it harder to reach its core audience as the Internet generation, which fundamentally communicates differently than previous generations, grows up. Anderson goes on to tell the story of MySpace. Originally, founders Anderson and Chris DeWolfe started …

In its annual forecast report, Deloitte's Technology, Media and Telecommunications arm made big predictions for 2007. To begin: tech companies will respond to concerns about the environment by designing products and services that conserve. These items draw energy from the environment around them, including body heat, ambient light and movement harvested in different ways. With advertisers frustrated by their unpredictable content, social networking sites will start charging their users for heightened privacy protection. This would help advertisers, businesses and older generations feel more comfortable. Subscriptions may also include premium services, like voice-messaging, online storage or Web page design. …

Netflix took a giant step into the future by announcing earlier this week that the DVD-by-mail subscription service will start renting movies and TV shows via the Internet. The company is introducing the service in a phased rollout over the next six months, offering subscribers more than 1,000 movies and TV shows on their personal computers at no additional cost. This doesn't mean Netflix is getting out of the DVD-by-mail business. High-speed Web networks still aren't high-speed enough to make movie downloads fast or convenient. When that day comes, software delivered via DVDs and CDs will die. How …

Just three weeks before YouTube's acquisition by Google last September, the company unveiled Suzie Reider as YouTube's first chief marketing officer. The pending Google deal may have had something to do with that, as the online video site clearly needed to get serious about its business model. Reider is charged with expanding YouTube's ad sales and marketing teams in order to make money off YouTube's offerings. One of the changes she's implemented is the prominent advertiser video on the YouTube home page, which users can rate, share and discuss as they would any video on the …

As we know, viral marketing on the Web is becoming something more essential to the marketers' media mix, but it's a tight rope they have to walk between engaging users to help get the word out and upsetting them. Case in point: Sony's fake blog designed last fall to help spur sales of its PlayStation Portable game console. Consumers don't like being duped into reading fake praise for a product; the press was all over Sony for the marketing ploy. Sony could have avoided the backlash if it called on The Viral, a London startup that specializes in crafting …

Apple continues to receive big-time praise in the wake of its iPhone announcement, the latest being TheStreet.com columnist Jim Cramer, who is also host of the popular show "Mad Money." Cramer tells his investor-readers to stick with Apple because when it comes to new media, Apple just gets it. He says of all the announcements made early this year so far, Apple's iPhone is the only one with any real significance. Forget the new Disney.com or the CBS-YouTube deal or whatever NBC is doing with iVillage. Apple is the only these media brands (with the exception of News …

Google's foray into the inexact territory of television ratings is one of the worst-kept secrets in recent media history. The fact that one of the big TV networks--CBS--is abetting Google's initial entry into the $68 billion television ad business, is more of a surprise. CBS Corp. is already close to finishing a deal that would have Google sell ads on CBS Radio, so a television deal could be only a few steps behind. Unnamed sources said Google would offer CBS revenue guarantees in exchange for licensing and reselling its traditional media inventory, including, perhaps, local TV spots. …

AOL yesterday agreed to buy Swedish ad broker TradeDoubler, marking the first acquisition by the Time Warner company since Randy Falco was named chief executive in November. The ad network, one of Europe's biggest, will cost AOL $900 million. "If you want to get a good hold on the European Internet advertising market, TradeDoubler is the best bet," said Internet industry analyst Mats Bergstroem of the Stockholm firm Nordea Securities. TradeDoubler is slightly different than Advertising.com, the ad inventory reseller AOL purchased in 2004. TradeDoubler works on behalf of marketers, gathering their ads in a network and …

The idea of social networking on cell phones has always sounded obscure, but cell-phone companies are starting to offer services using Global Positioning System receivers, turning social networking on cell phones into something practical. Loopt is one such company, offering a buddy-tracking tool through the wireless operator Boost Mobile, which is owned by Sprint-Nextel Corp. Its service uses GPS to help users find their friends' mobile phones anywhere in the U.S., allowing them to zoom into a city map or zoom out to find out where they are. Loopt already has 100,000 users since launching last fall. …

Media companies are frustrated with Google's YouTube. NBC Universal, for example, says it sends out more than 1,000 requests per month to have copyrighted content taken down. At this point, the media giant has three full-time staff members troll the site each day looking for studio-owned material. Execs estimate that nearly half of the NBC-U content on the site is unauthorized. As in the case of the Brazilian supermodel's indiscretions on a public beach, as fast as YouTube can take the videos down, its users can upload them again. But here's the YouTube conundrum: While copyright owners worry that …