Oh, oh, all sorts of shenanigans going on over at Viacom, the owners of MTV. The media company's chairman and controlling shareholder, Sumner Redstone, announced yesterday that Viacom CEO Tom Freston was no longer on the payroll. He's out. Gone. Forgotten. Who was Tom again? Never heard of him.
It seems that Freston has "lost the confidence of Wall Street", despite the fact that MTV, which Freston has played a key role in developing, has actually been quite successful. However, overall Viacom's performance has not been good enough since Redstone split up his media conglom into two separate businesses last year - CBS controlling the group's terrestrial TV and radio stations, and Viacom, controlling the cable channels and film studios.
City types expected Viacom to benefit most from the split - but in fact its stock prices have slumped, while CBS has performed well. Insiders say the slump has been caused by the disappointing performance of Viacom's film studio business and also because the company failed to make any major leaps in the online space, while competitor News Corp scored a coup in that domain by acquiring MySpace at just the right time.
Freston will be replaced as CEO by former Viacom exec and long term Redstone ally Philippe Dauman.