Media Mavens: Comedy Central's Erik Flannigan

Written by R. Scott Raynovich - Light Reading

Thursday, March 6. 2008 at 08:00 AM EST Post a comment

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For Contentinople's new interview series, Media Mavens, we asked Comedy Central's Erik Flannigan about the future of digital distribution and how, specifically, social networking, video-sharing, and other new digital technologies affect the distribution of high-quality professional content.

Erik Flannigan is executive VP of digital media for MTV Networks 's Comedy Central and Spike TV, where he has the responsibility of deciding how South Park, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart are distributed online.

Flannigan was formerly AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL)'s VP of programming, where he oversaw Moviefone.com, AOL Music, AOL Radio, and AOL Television. He's also held executive roles at Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS) and RealNetworks Inc. (Nasdaq: RNWK). And he used to be one of us: Flannigan was the managing editor of ICE Magazine as well as a contributing editor to The Rocket.

Flannigan has been aggressively driving digital distribution. He has discovered the power of distributing content through the social networks and other Internet avenues. Because of this, Comedy Central and Spike TV have moved to wider and freer distribution of content. This is no longer a stodgy "you cannot take our content" media company.

Click here to read the interview.