"MTV strikes deal with Chinese search giant..."

Viacom, the owner of MTV, has struck a deal to provide television and music video content to the Chinese search engine giant, Baidu.com.

The partnership between MTV Networks and Baidu.com, the search engine market leader in China and reportedly the fourth most-visited website in the world, marks the biggest effort to date to introduce American television and entertainment programming to the country.

Baidu.com, which outperforms both Google and Yahoo! in its home market, was set up by a 38-year-old former Disney employee, Robin Li, with $1.2m (£640,000) in start-up capital.

The deal comes two months after MTV Networks, which operates Nickledeon and VH-1 as well as the MTV family of international channels, struck a similar deal with Google to distribute advert-supported clips over the internet.

Bill Roedy, the head of MTV Networks International, described the deal as an "amazing opportunity to tap into a new market ... a direct link to the number one portal in China".

MTV Networks will provide Baidu with 15,000 hours of original video and licensed music content. Much of it will be dubbed and tailored to Chinese viewers, with popular regional artists also featured.

Baidu will also create a branded area on its website, called MTV Zone.
MTV is broadcast into Southern China, and Viacom has a partnership with the Shanghai Media Group.
MTV also has deals with China Mobile and China Unicom to provide content to handsets.
China is the fastest growing internet market, second only to the US, with around 123 million users.

My Comments...

This article talks about the partnership between Viacom and Chinese search engine Baidu. The partnership has been formed in an effort for Viacom - the owner of MTV to supply television and music content to the search engine in order to introduce such texts to the Chinese media market.
In my opinion this could be a very successful partnership considering the recent success between the merge of Google and YouTube. This is because when two large companies do integrate to cater to the wants of their audiences the result should be a positive one.