• CNET News.com, Tuesday, March 20, 2007 10:30 AM

CNET calls him Viacom's "secret weapon." Mika Salmi, the media conglomerate's new president of global digital media, not only founded Atom Entertainment, which he sold to Viacom last year for $200 million, but he helped discover Trent Reznor, the genius behind the rock group Nine Inch Nails. It's that kind of hipster/businessman sensibility that Viacom thinks will help its digital arm through growing pains, including a $1 billion lawsuit against Google and YouTube to bring Viacom content back under Viacom control.

Part of Salmi's job is to grow the company's digital business outside of Google's influence, while breaking down walls between its TV and digital properties and finding new distribution channels. A tough task, since millions of Web users are accustomed to finding video clips from their favorite TV shows--including Viacom's--on Google's YouTube.

Right now, a Viacom-YouTube partnership is out of the question. Salmi says he hopes a licensing deal can be worked out, though he's confident that MTV Networks and Viacom would be fine if that never happened. The future, he says, belongs to niches, not big "portal sites" like MySpace and YouTube.

He adds that niche content has been Viacom's offline specialty, so his plan is to create content, communities and virtual worlds out of popular Viacom brands like "South Park" and "The Colbert Report." It's an interesting idea, but do consumers really want more fragmented media fragmented? Aren't we trending toward greater media consolidation through personalization?

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