MTV Goes Global : The pioneering American cable music video network is bringing its distinctive brand of entertainment to 24 countries worldwide--and the Soviet Union may be next.

“Q uiero mi MTV.”

“Je veux ma MTV.”

“Ya khochu moy MTV.”

The people at MTV Networks, America’ pioneering 24-hour rock-video channel on cable TV, are betting that young people all over the world want their music television.

In the past two years, the New York-based company, a unit of Viacom International Inc., has quietly expanded into the international television marketplace, launching its patented brand of flashy, youth-oriented programming in Australia, Japan, Europe and South America--24 countries in all. MTV executives even traveled to the Soviet Union recently for preliminary discussions about starting up operations there.

The expansion represents MTV Networks’ largest single investment by far since the company was born in 1981. It comes at a time when a number of other major American media and entertainment companies are making moves internationally, especially in Europe, where the deregulation and privatization of the historically government-controlled broadcast medium, along with new technologies such as satellite broadcasting, promises the emergence of a single media marketplace by 1992.

Among the companies that recently have launched European ventures are NBC, Ted Turner’s Cable News Network, the all-sports channel ESPN, Walt Disney Co. and MTM Enterprises. All are trying to get in on the ground floor of what they see as the coming global communications network.

“Europe is the last great frontier in the TV business, the last big game to be played,” says Tom Freston, MTV’s 43-year-old president and chief executive.

Freston figures that MTV may have an edge in conquering that frontier, in the form of a virtual lock on its target audience of 12- to 34-year-olds around the world.

“This is the first international generation,” he said, during a recent interview. “They wear Levi’s, shop at Benetton, wear Swatch watches and drink Coca-Cola. This is not to say there aren’t cultural differences, that the French aren’t different from the Germans. But a French teen-ager and German teen-ager are much more similar to each other than they are to their parents.”

The greatest common denominator among young people around the world, of course, is rock ‘n’ roll, MTV’s stock in trade.

“Music crosses borders very easily, and the lingua franca of rock ‘n’ roll is English,” Freston said. “Rock is an Anglo-American form; its roots are Anglo. German rock bands sing in English; Swedish rock bands sing in English.”

“Music is the global language,” said Sara Levinson, MTV’s executive vice president of new business development. “We want to be the global rock ‘n’ roll village where we can talk to the youth worldwide.”

Although Freston and Levinson are confident that MTV can deliver its target audience to international advertisers, the company has been cautious in its overseas expansion, laying off part of the financial risk by taking on various foreign partners.

MTV Europe is a joint venture between Viacom, Robert Maxwell’s Mirror Newspaper Group and British Telecom. Headquartered in London, it’s MTV’s only overseas service that is largely ad-supported and broadcasts 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

MTV Australia, a joint venture between Viacom and Nine Broadcasting International, Australia’s No. 1 network, airs just six hours a week, on Friday and Saturday nights.

MTV Internacionale is a one-hour weekly show--featuring Spanish-speaking announcers--that’s produced in MTV’s New York studio and sold to 11 Latin American countries. In the United States, the program is aired on the Spanish-language Telemundo network.

MTV Japan, launched in July of this year on the Tokyo Broadcasting System, Japan’s largest commercial station, airs five hours a week at very odd times--1:20 a.m. to 4:20 a.m. on Tuesday and 2:35 a.m. to 4:50 a.m. on Friday.

“They’re trying to build up those time slots,” Levinson deadpanned.

“The problem now in these countries is that there’s just a few stations and they have to go after very high ratings and there’s only X amount of slots they can put any program in,” Freston explained. “So you’re lucky to get three, six or nine hours a week. But when alternative TV comes in, we’ll have developed our international trademark. We’ll have a head start on launching a 24-hour network and we’ll know other partners in that country that we can possibly joint venture with. That’s our global strategy.

“Right now, once you get beyond Brazil, Europe, North America, Japan and Australia, you’re talking about selling some shows--a one-hour block or a two-hour block.”

According to Freston, the Latin American, Australian and Japanese ventures are already profitable, and only MTV Europe is running in the red. “Unfortunately, broadcasting 24 hours is expensive and tens of millions of dollars will be spent before Europe makes a dime,” he said. “We never expected to make any money there until 1994. That was our original business plan, and we’re running a little ahead of that.”

Part of the problem with Europe is the same problem that MTV faced when it first went on the air in the United States seven years ago--not enough homes wired for cable. There are currently only 13 million cable households on the Continent, or 10% of the total televisions households. MTV Europe has 3.2 million subscribers at present, according to the company.

By comparison, MTV was launched in this country in 1981 with 1.5 million subscribers among 25 million cable households. “We’re now in 49% of American homes, about 45 million, and we’re adding between 20,000 and 30,000 homes a day,” Freston said. “We’re growing at the rate cable is growing, 7% to 8% a year.”

Videos as Opening Acts

Another problem in Europe is that TV is still heavily regulated, and there’s not much advertising time that MTV can buy to promote itself. “You can’t tell the government what to do,” Levinson said. “I want my MTV? Right. You don’t have much advertising, so you’re basically down to guerrilla tactics. Fortunately, we do have the great advantage that a large portion of Europeans in our target group have heard of MTV. At least they’ve heard the Dire Straits song,” she said, referring to the 1986 international hit “Money for Nothing,” whose refrain is, “That ain’t workin’, that’s the way you do it, you play the guitar on the MTV.”

One way MTV is promoting itself overseas is by persuading rock stars such as Sting to show a half-hour of MTV on large screens before live concerts, instead of a warm-up act. The company is also sponsoring a world tour by the group Bon Jovi and is getting ready to market a line of MTV clothing featuring its television logo.

Despite the obstacles in getting to its audience, Larry Gerbrandt, a media analyst for the investment research firm of Paul Kagan & Associates, thinks that MTV stands a good chance of catching on internationally.

“It’s become an international brand name,” he said. “What MTV has done in terms of format and underlying concept translates well into other languages. You can take the MTV concept and adapt it to any country just by having the host speak in the language of that country. The graphics, the slogans and the music, certainly, all translate.

“Just how big it will become is a little hard to tell, since the whole concept of private networks and ad-supported programming overseas is brand-new at this point. They were able to pull it off in this country, however. Even though their ratings are low (compared to network TV), they remain very profitable because their cost of programming is so low. And they are a must buy on Madison Avenue for anyone who wants to reach the young adult or teen audience.”

One of the first major advertisers to sign a long-term agreement with MTV Europe was Levi’s. “We think it’s a very viable, unique and potentially popular medium,” said John Ankeny, director of marketing for Levi’s Europe, based in Brussels. “And as we develop into a pan-European broadcast marketplace, we think it will become more and more important.”

“It’s awfully early to predict results at this stage,” Ankeny said. “But our experience would tend to verify that they can deliver that target audience across borders and language barriers. We air the same commercial, in some cases with the same voice-over, in all the countries of Europe. MTV is a perfect match for us demographically.”

Difficult to Measure Success

According to Ankeny, the Levi’s deal with MTV runs three years “for X amount at a certain cost per thousand, with guaranteed delivery of X number of households. And they are about on their plan.”

Other major advertisers who’ve signed with MTV Europe include Toyota, Gillette, Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola, JVC stereo equipment, Pentax cameras and all the major American record and movie companies.

Freston and Levinson acknowledge that its difficult to tell how well MTV is doing in many countries because the measuring capabilities are just not there.

“In the United Kingdom, which has metered households, our viewing level is in the 1-plus range (in rating points), and that’s equal to or better than what we’ve done in the States,” Freston said. “We’re doing very well in Scandinavia and in Holland, which has a lot of cable. Amsterdam is 85% wired for cable. It’s there when you buy your house, like a utility, for an extra $6 a month.”

“We’re No. 1 in our time slot in Ecuador,” Levinson said. “We simulcast the show on a local FM station, which works very well because evidently the TV sets in Latin America have a tinny sound.”

According to Freston, even with MTV Europe losing money, “there is no net cash outflow for our international operations. We currently derive about 5% of our revenues from international and anticipate that will grow to 30% within five years.”

‘Remote-Control Crazy’

And back in this country, business is better than ever, he said. “We just completed the most profitable year in our history. Our earnings were up 42% from the year before.

“We’ve gone from being basically an FM radio station that showed music videos to be more like a TV network for teens and young adults. It’s still very much about music and music videos, there’s an attitude. But we’ve made an effort this year to kind of dust it off, look at things a new way, get a little more experimental.

One thing they’ve learned, Freston said, is that in order to hold the attention of an audience that’s “remote-control crazy, we had to package videos into shows with less random video placement, with more of a beginning, middle and end, so that people were less inclined to zap and leave.”

The result has been the development of half-hour and hour shows such as “Yo--MTV Raps,” which features videos and interviews with rap music artists, and “Remote Control,” a quiz show about American pop trivia that has proven extremely popular overseas.

The overseas expansion has proven to be a two-way street, according to Levinson. “As much as making a profit, one primary reason to do it is to enrich the programming on the air here. What we see is a lot of back-and-forth activity. In Japan, we now have access to Japanese animators and people at the cutting edge of TV production there,” she said.

“Our on-air people from the States are now starting to work with their European counterparts to find the real talent. We’re using stuff from Europe on the air here. We’re sending someone to Australia to check out their Aborigine artists.”

The international operation is “like an early-warning system for us here, since so much music now comes from Europe,” Freston said. “We hear about new artists first, and its not just hype from some guy at a record company, it’s from our own people. Terence Trent D’arby is an example. We were first to play him in the States after hearing him in Europe. From an image standpoint, to our audience that’s important. If we can highlight something quick that our audience likes and that becomes credible, and we’re the first place they found out about it, it wears well on us.”

A more recent example is the Gipsy Kings, a band of authentic gypsies from Southern France who sing in the Gitane tongue, a blend of Spanish, French and Gypsy dialect. After MTV Europe began playing a video by the band, the group was signed to a recording contract by New York-based Elektra Records. The King’s first album just entered Billboard magazine’s chart of best-selling records and tapes, and earlier this month the group played to a sold-out crowd at the Palace in Los Angeles.

“I can make the claim today that we’re the world’s first global network,” Freston said. “That an American rock ‘n’ roll network was first shouldn’t be surprising. It’s not to us.”