• by October 14, 2005

And the Internet land grabs just keep coming....

MTV Networks snapped up IFLM, a provider of short films and video content for the Web, for a cool $49 million. We assume that MTV needs to go beyond its well-honed reality show formula and hokey TV programming and offer something new on the Web. Picking up IFILM can only help make MTV cool again, maybe even edgy.

MTV expects to increase IFILM's reach to more than 10 million users a month, buff up ad revenues, and heavily cross-promote the site's content on other MTV Web properties. We are still waiting to see what, if anything new, MTV will do with NeoPets, the online virtual critter community it acquired in June for $160 million.

We are still processing America Online's acquisition of Jason Calacanis' Weblogs for some $20 million and are interested to know how the relationship will work and what the expectations are for ad revenues from the cache of blogging sites. Looking to connect with AOL's Jim Bankoff on that one in the near-term.

Meanwhile, the list of potential suitors, partners, acquirers, or stakeholders in AOL just got longer. As everyone knows by now, Google and Comcast have entered the race for AOL. Move over, Microsoft. It seems as though everyone wants a piece of AOL's business now. Google would seem to have a natural edge, given that AOL already uses its search engine and derives some 80 percent of its revenues from those searches.

AOL is sitting pretty right about now; as everyone knows, it's good to be in the catbird seat. It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out. Care to enter a wager? Send us your bets; we'll keep track.