CBS Head Leslie Moonves Hangs Out with the Cool Guys

Authored by Jay Baage on January 10, 2007 - 10:30am.

Las Vegas - Old media’s grand old man Sumner Redstone’s media empire Viacom is getting down with Web 2.0’s poster boys in the form of YouTube CEO Chad Hurley, Second Life CEO Philip Rosedale, and Sling Box CEO Blake Krikorian. That’s clearly the essence of CBS’ CEO Leslie Moonves’ keynote at CES on Tuesday afternoon. He paraded his new friends on stage, one after another, and had them go on about the wonders that CBS content can do in the hands of new technology, instead of promoting it all himself.

This approach makes sense if you think about it, but it is a radically different tactic to how the music industry has handled the threat of new technology so far. I could not envision Universal Music’s CEO a few years ago coming out and hugging Napster’s Shawn Fanning, while telling the audience that P2P is a fantastic new innovation. But that is basically what Les Moonves did.

"There's no such thing as old and new media anymore, there's just media," Moonves said. "We're all playing on the same big digital field now.”

But don’t be fooled. Like CEA CEO Gary Shapiro said in his keynote on Monday, the fight between content owners and distributors/CE companies and users is far from resolved. Remember, these new partnerships are all experiments. At least old media is starting to get it – everything will be digital media in the future and like Les Moonves said, those who do not “march in front of the parade” will end up behind it.

What will CBS be in the future? Leslie Moonves somewhat cryptic answer should perhaps inspire, as well as worry its shareholders:

“Our goal is clear... to be sort of a new thing, an audience company.”

And what will the revolutionary new business model look like for “an audience company”? I guess we have to stay tuned.

Joakim Baage