• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, March 15, 2017

When your TV show isn’t doing so well, there one thing you can always do: Make it bigger,  in terms of availability or perhaps content.

Viacom’s MTV is expanding one of its high-rated TV shows, the “MTV Movie Awards,” now 25 years old. It will be renamed “MTV Movie & TV Awards.” Why? A MTV executive, in a press release, says we are in the “golden age of content.”

Last year, “MTV Movie Awards” pulled down 3.5 million Nielsen measured viewers across nine Viacom networks. In comparison to the year before, this was up 52% from the 2.3 million viewers.  Sounds good? Problem is the show was aired over four Viacom networks -- MTV, VH1, MTV2 and Logo in 2015 -- not the nine in 2016.

Or look at MTV’s bigger annual awards show: “Video Music Awards” was down 34% to 6.5 million versus the previous year. This came from an audience of 11 Viacom networks. (Silver lining? The 2016 VMAs also drew 45.8 million streams on Facebook).

If you are wondering where Viacom is going as a company, you might want to focus on this high profile stuff going forward -- iconic shows that have some history with viewers and marketers.

Viacom still has much going for it as a traditional-based TV network group -- despite some ratings declines.

The cable network TV group had the highest average viewing of any cable TV group among key viewers-- averaging a total day 2.3 million 18-49 viewers in the Nielsen C3 metric in January, according to MoffettNathanson Research.  Additionally, Viacom also tops all TV network groups in prime-time averaging 2.9 million 18-49 viewers.

Popular culture content on TV networks can always been a winner -- thus adding award-worthy TV content is good to the movie content in its MTV shows. 

But is all this too little too late?

Perhaps millennials are shrugging their shoulders. Shouldn’t MTV, for example, have been more like SnapChat, Instagram, or even Facebook -- including a more vibrant social-media business? Continued good news is MTV still attracts major music talent to these annual events -- pulling in high levels of millennials and/or Gen Xers on live, linear TV.

Viacom’s networks has seen some ratings declines -- but so has many other cable TV network groups. Still, with all the new changes for the company -- especially now in focusing on a smaller group of its TV networks --  you wonder what’s next.

In the near term, on the advertising front, there is hope. Starting with last year’s upfront advertising market, marketers have shifted media dollars to back linear, traditional TV networks from digital media, especially as the chorus of criticism rose when it came to fraud, weak viewability and questionable metrics issues.

From all of this, analysts will continue to focus on the content -- golden or other high-priced metals.