MTV Changes Format, Mixing Full-Length Shows, Music Videos : Television: The outlaw rock-music channel will announce the inclusion of several ‘customized’ series during the Western Cable Show in Anaheim.

MTV--the cable channel that made a business and a pop-culture art form out of quick-hit music videos--is moving away from its original all-video format.

Expanding a recent trend toward full-length shows on the rock-music channel, MTV in January will launch several new series, from a morning program hosted by a male-female duo to “vidcoms” (a hybrid of comedy and music videos). The new shows are designed to appeal to viewers throughout the day.

“The idea is to have hosts and shows that differentiate MTV in the morning from MTV at night, the way that NBC viewers know that they’re going to see Bryant Gumbel in the morning and Tom Brokaw at night,” Doug Herzog, senior vice president in charge of programming for MTV, said in an interview Tuesday. “Music videos will still represent 90% of our programming. But instead of having random videos, we’ll be customizing shows and hosts to improve our presentation to the audience who’s out there.”

The changes, Herzog emphasized, are evolutionary, not revolutionary--which, in terms of MTV’s outlaw image with young people, would mean turning it into conventional network TV.

“ ‘Dayparting’ does represent a bit of maturing on our part,” he said, referring to the practice of offering different types of programs at different times of the day, “but we’re never going to be all-programmed like the networks because we’re driven by music videos.

“We’ve made frequent changes in MTV because, in effect, we’ve promised our viewers that we won’t be the same today as we were five years ago. Part of these changes simply come from the fact that we didn’t want to enter the next decade looking the way we did during the last decade.”

Although MTV is seen in some 48 million homes in the United States and has expanded to 26 foreign countries, its new programming strategy may give MTV a way not only to stay fresh but also to encourage viewers to stay tuned. “There’s a lot of grazing and zapping out there among TV viewers,” Herzog acknowledged. “We want to keep people interested between the videos.”

MTV is announcing its new overall scheduling strategy this week to cable operators at the Western Cable Show in Anaheim, which opens today. Sometime next week, the cable network is expected to sign the co-hosts who will introduce the videos and do comedy on a new early morning show.

“We hope it will be like Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford on bad coffee,” Herzog said. “The premise of the comedy is that she’s a morning person, and he’s not, so he may seemingly stumble into the studio--or sleep through the show altogether.”

From 8 to 11 p.m., MTV will introduce a new three-hour programming block to counterprogram prime time on the commercial networks.

“That’s the place where we’ll be emphasizing breaking new videos and news from the music world,” Herzog said. The hosts for the show have not yet been named.

Among the new “vidcoms” that will be introduced for the 7 p.m. time slot are two shows designed as an off-center version of ABC’s “Wide World of Sports”: “Kevin Seal: Sporting Fool,” starring a comedian who does unusual sports, such as bungee-jumping, and “Colin Quinn’s Manly World,” with real athletes joining the comedian-host.

RELATED STORY: F14