Tom Freston
speaker
113 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 6 Feb
Tom Freston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, when music videos sort of hit, I mean, they were really kind of revolutionary.
People hadn't really seen anything like that.
Six or seven years in, I mean, a bloom was a little off the rose.
That's not to say that the music videos weren't good, but a new device had come along technology-wise called the remote control.
which was maybe the biggest disruptor of all, that little soap bar-sized device.
And people would check out after three minutes or so if they didn't like the next video that was coming on.
We thought, though, that we wanted to stay close to music.
It brought us so much.
we thought maybe we could be a bigger place and a more reliable place and less reliant to the peaks and valleys of the music industry if we created our own programming that was about some of the things that the music was about about you know i'm talking about uh fashion and and movies and uh you know beefing up our news area we thought we could take say 10 of our
168 hours a week and devoted to non-music programming or stuff that related to the popular culture and we could have a sounder and a bigger business and that turned out to be the case.
Now the problem was that these shows would get higher ratings than music hours so gradually over time and like I'm talking now the last 10 or 15 years there was a decision to just get out of the music business entirely because the idea that
you know, you could compete with something like Vivo and YouTube, where people could get any video they wanted on demand on the internet, once the internet was capable of really streaming video in full force, was, you know, it was an unattractive proposition.
So you ended up with what you have today, which is a network bereft of music, whose name used to be music television.
That's not to say that, as I said earlier, that it couldn't be reimagined
for digital in a way that they could make a business out of it using a digital on demand technology.
No, I was just saying, so it was a strategic move to get into non-music programming, and I would also say that the creative cadre that we had at work always wanted to stretch out and do new things, so we came up with new formats like The Real World, or we would find young animators and bring them into the fold and do shows like Beavis and Butthead that we thought had the same attitude as MTV, but it wasn't necessarily music.
Made it a bigger place.
Like, how do you think about that?
Yeah, I know the question.
I know that question.
Showing 41–60 of 113 · page 3 of 6
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