NEW YORK, Aug. 7 (UPI) -- California's Google Inc. will distribute video programming from Viacom Inc.'s MTV Networks to hundreds of niche Web sites and blogs.
The content deal amounts to a syndication of Viacom's programming to the broader Web, allowing the content to reach a much bigger audience than Viacom's own Web sites draw, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
As part of the deal, the 25-year-old MTV Networks will also sell episodes of its programs through Google's video store. MTV has similar agreements with AOL and Apple's iTunes.
The content will be embedded with video advertising and the resulting ad revenue will be shared among Viacom, Google and Web sites that run the clips.
"Our technology takes MTV's video, marries it to an ad and shows it on a third site. No one's ever done this before," Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said. "If this works, it would be a very large business for all players."
