by Greg Lindsay

MTV is becoming a global brand by following a
surprising strategy: keeping it real by keeping it
local. Your VJs, your shows, and your music—
wherever you are.

In São Paulo, Seoul, Singapore or Zanzibar, Carson Daly is just another American tourist. Daly may be MTV’s star VJ at home—the boy next door who draws screaming hordes of preteen girls to Times Square on weekday afternoons— but in Johannesburg, they’ve never heard of him. Instead, MTV is currently on the lookout for its own star in Africa to headline its latest offering, MTV Base. That makes sense considering that, in a typical half hour, the pan-African audience watches videos by acts like Nigeria’s 2 Face and South Africa’s Lebo Mathosa, with just a little dollop of Britney Spears and Interpol thrown in for good measure. More than 20 years ago, American teenagers wanted their MTV, and got it. Now Africans teens have an MTV of their own—and Carson Daly isn’t in the picture.

MTV Base—the first MTV channel devoted to the music and youth of a continent—went live at the end of February. The 24-7 broadcast slots globally known local acts like Ladysmith Black Mambazo and flourishing native genres like kwaito, hip-life, mbalax and zouk, alongside the videos of their American hip-hop cousins and exports like “Pimp My Ride,” “Cribs,” and even “The Ashlee Simpson Show.”

The English-language channel’s audience is tiny compared to its parent or even its Brazilian, Japanese, or Indian counterparts. Today, its audience is just the 1.3 million subscribers of a pay-TV satellite hovering above sub- Saharan Africa, and only a third of its programming consisted of local acts at launch. But it’s telling that MTV Base started the same way MTV European did back in 1987, when a single, English-speaking feed broadcast to a million European viewers was greeted with a deafening silence.

Today, 99 channels and about a billion viewers later, MTV is the standard bearer for global youth culture, the best known and best-loved television channel on the planet. Now seen on six continents in 180 countries, eight out of every ten MTV viewers live somewhere other than the United States, and half of those eight live in South America or Asia. The size and potential of that audience is so great and still so untapped that MTV’s parent, the media giant Viacom, is even considering splitting itself in two, in part to give MTV center stage.

MTV’s strength has always been its utter mutability—its uncanny knack for forgetting its own past and national identity and reflecting, rather than forcing, the hopes, dreams, fears and desires of its viewers back at them. And that impulse is always there, whether you’re watching from New York or New Dehli … which means everything else is dramatically different: the music, the VJs, the programs, even the suits running the channel are from the same world as each channel’s audience. The entire world might be demanding “I WANT MY MTV!” but no matter where I am, what my skin color is, or what faith I believe, I’m guaranteed an MTV that is all mine—because that’s the only MTV I’m ultimately willing to watch.

In India, that means soap operas and Bollywood numbers interspersed with episodes of the subcontinent’s homegrown version of “Punk’d,” “MTV Bakra” (Bakra being Hindi for “goat”). In Italy, bands drop by the studio to whip up their favorite dishes in an on-set kitchen, while their otherworldly good-looking Brazilian VJs star as the super-powered heroes of their own animated series “Megaliga” (animated VJ alter-egoswith superpowers!) The late, unlamented “Jackass” franchise lives on through “Whatever Things,” an MTV Southeast Asian hit in which Hong Kong’s answer to Johnny Knoxville and his wild bunch wreak havoc all along the South China Sea (or what passes for havoc in these ultrapolite societies). And in Indonesia—the most populous Muslim country in the World—MTV pauses five times a day to catch its breath and pray toward Mecca. They’ve never heard of Spring Break there (and would be scandalized if anyone tried to fill them in), so MTV celebrates the month-long Muslim holiday of Ramadan instead, somehow managing to make fasting look cool.

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