The 80-year-old executive, who sounded remarkably youthful in a phone interview with Fortune<\/em>, harkened back to the days in the 1960s and \u201970s when \u201cfreedom was in the air.\u201d The vibe was very different then: \u201cIt was like, I don\u2019t want to work for \u2018the man,’\u201d he told Fortune<\/em>, referencing a formative summer when he worked as a bellboy in Lake George in the Adirondack foothills of upstate New York. \u201cI had sort of been on the traditional conveyor belt: go to college, get out, get a job. And then I met all these sort of bohemian characters who \u2014 their idea was, you didn\u2019t have a career. You kind of improvise your life. You know, the idea was to kind of maximize experience and do interesting things and take some risks.\u201d<\/p>\n Freston added that he was a big fan of both \u201cbeat\u201d and libertarian literature, the former made famous by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and the latter by Ayn Rand. They both had common themes, he said: \u201cexperience and being an individual were important.\u201d As he writes in his new memoir Unplugged<\/em>, this improvisational journey took him to Afghanistan and India, a business career that was \u201cwild and fulfilling and for a long time profitable.\u201d But it was also \u201creally hard work\u201d and was \u201creally humbling,\u201d adding that \u201chumility is not a thing you see a lot of in the entertainment business.\u201d He didn\u2019t comment directly on the major figures in the current bidding war for Warner Bros., but the example of David Zaslav moving into famed producer Robert Evans\u2019 Hollywood mansion is a prime example of the neo-mogul mindset.<\/p>\n Freston has long been semi-retired, advising media brands such as Oprah Winfrey and Vice while serving as the chairman of the ONE Campaign, the anti-poverty effort in Africa led by U2\u2019s Bono (a friend, Freston said). <\/p>\n As Freston rolled back the years with Fortune<\/em> and looked out on a much-changed media landscape, he briefly donned his antitrust hat to analyze the bidding war between Netflix and his old company Paramount for Warner Bros. Discovery and how things got to this point. \u201cNo matter which way it goes, there\u2019s really nothing in it for the consumer,\u201d Freston said with a sigh.<\/p>\n Freston observed that the media industry is now dominated by \u201cmonolith companies \u2026 increasingly run by tech people, where data becomes more important than instinct.\u201d He highlighted A24 and Neon as two companies that remind him of the old, almost artisanal MTV, where refreshing the creative instinct became core to success, because Viacom\u2019s once-dominant basic cable lineup appealed to a transient youth culture. \u201cOur challenge was: how do we continue to innovate for these changing demographics that would pass through us, whether it be on [Nickelodeon] or on MTV or Comedy Central or whatever.\u201d<\/p>\n Just 33 years old when he started leading MTV, Freston pointed out that the original audience was Baby Boomers like himself, which was then replaced by Gen Xers with different sensibilities, and so on. Talent can\u2019t be overlooked, Freston argued, because he wanted a creative and \u201ccutting edge\u201d mentality that would stay hooked up to a youth culture that turned over every five years or less. \u201cI didn\u2019t put a salesperson in charge, which would be a traditional way in the television business. I had a creative person in charge.\u201d<\/p>\n In many cases, MTV was someone\u2019s first job, \u201cand they\u2019d learn some things and leave in a few years, and they\u2019d be replaced with another younger person.\u201d He argued that keeping the employee population young made it easier to reinvent the network periodically. When the end came shortly after the millennial generation\u2019s heyday, exemplified by the Total Request Live program, Freston explained that the same forces afoot in Warner-Netflix-Paramount were leaving MTV exposed to the digital wave.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were precluded from using our music video library online,\u201d Freston said, explaining that the same licensing deals that had enabled MTV to dominate youth culture for decades proved its undoing when YouTube disrupted how young people liked to watch music videos. \u201cThe real players turned out to be the social networks and it was hard to invent one,\u201d he added. \u201cYou had to buy one of the ones that were out there, and the only one that ever really got bought was MySpace, and that kind of disintegrated.\u201d The other social-media networks were able to build \u201cunbelievable franchises because they were able to run at losses for years without Wall Street piling on, which would have happened for any of the legacy media companies.\u201d <\/p>\n Reflecting on his own \u201cmissed opportunity\u201d to bridge this gap, Freston recounted Viacom\u2019s attempt to buy Facebook when the platform had only $9 million in revenue. He recalled Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s visit to discuss a potential acquisition: \u201cI remember he had a hoodie on and flip flops. It was February in Times Square. And he was younger than anybody on our young staff.\u201d While Viacom was the first to make a bid for Facebook, Freston believes Zuckerberg was never serious about selling, more that he was \u201ccurious about, what\u2019s a youth media company today look like.\u201d<\/p>\n Netflix and other platforms, of course, achieved massive scale by playing the upstart MTV role. \u201cThey were able to run at a profit because they were these new growth businesses. Wall Street turned a blind eye to losses for a long time. They got forgiveness on that score.\u201d He added that they began to \u201cvacuum up IP\u201d without necessarily having deals in place. While Netflix went the more traditional licensing route when Hollywood didn\u2019t see it as a threat, Freston noted that MTV was prevented from fighting YouTube\u2019s viral videos with its own digital music presence, almost like a revenge of the record labels that wrote those terms into the licensing deals.<\/p>\n Freston said he doesn\u2019t think any legacy media company distinguished itself in meeting the digital challenge with full force. \u201cDisney did the best job, I think, which was basically tripling down on their content capabilities in trying to make themselves more invincible and more crucial for the streaming services and for the digital onslaught to build up the biggest array of IP.\u201d He agreed that it was ironic in some senses that Netflix seems to be following that playbook with its pursuit of Warner Bros. He said he sees the same old cycle turning: \u201cThe forces for this deal seem to be inexorable. Consolidation seems to be the strategy for the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, Freston said he sees his former empire, MTV, as a cautionary tale of what happens when that emphasis on creativity gets severed. He lamented that leadership has \u201crun it into the ground over the last 15 years\u201d by replacing music-obsessed staff with \u201ctraditional kind of Hollywood showmaker type people,\u201d replacing hungry, music-obsessed creatives with a shorter-term mindset. His most symbolic grievance is the removal of the words \u201cMusic Television\u201d from the logo\u2014a decision that \u201cdrove me crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n Freston said he was grateful for his exciting ride at the helm of Viacom for many years, and grateful for some of the genuine friendships that emerged from his time running MTV. He highlighted Bono specifically, with whom he has worked in a chairman role for ONE and (Red), fighting poverty and AIDS in Africa. He said he knew a bit about Africa and poverty issues from his time working and living in Asia and also traveling in Africa, but he also mentioned good relationships with certain people he clicked with: John Mellencamp, David Bowie (a \u201cfascinating character\u201d) and Jon Bon Jovi.<\/p>\n In his laid-back style, Freston added that he wasn\u2019t sure when he sat down to write that there\u2019d by \u201cany kind of reasonable narrative to my life, which at one point seemed to be all these disparate parts.\u201d He came away thinking that his career had been in pursuit of a couple common objectives: trying to \u201clive and exist off the mainstream, more on the edge of the road,\u201d where things are more interesting and independent.<\/p>\n The \u201cbeat-poet\u201d executive said he still believes in the MTV brand, and it could come back with some creativity, maybe by positioning MTV as a human curator to counter \u201calgorithm-type music consumption.\u201d But he knows he isn\u2019t the man to lead it. \u201cIt\u2019s really a young person\u2019s business,\u201d Freston said, suggesting the reins should be handed to a 25-year-old who can operate with the same risk-taking humility he learned decades ago on the roads of Asia.<\/p>\n Editor\u2019s note: The author worked for Netflix from June 2024 through July 2025.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Tom #Freston #beatpoet #exec #MTV #cool #years #sees #consumer #Netflix #Warner #company<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tom Freston has never been a t… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5695,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[5147,596,1953,5149,446,5146,716,5148,461,1649,564,4748,457,84],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5694"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5694\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}How Netflix followed in MTV\u2019s footsteps<\/h2>\n
The MTV-Netflix cycle<\/h2>\n
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