Scannell Drops CEO Role at Next New Networks

NEW YORK, June 16: Herb
Scannell is relinquishing the CEO role at Next New Networks, the online
entertainment company he co-founded after serving as the president of
Nickelodeon and vice chairman of MTV Networks, but will remain as the executive
chairman.

Next New Networks was
launched early last year to debut “micro television networks” across the
Internet. Partners in the company include Fred Seibert, Emil Rensing, Jed
Simmons and Tim Shey, with an initial $8 million in venture capital funding
courtesy of Spark Capital. “During the time we’ve been operating we’ve
accomplished a lot,” Scannell said in his blog on the Next New Networks site.
“We championed a new distribution method, ‘super-distribution’…and that meant
that our networks’ shows would be seen not just on their own URLs but on as
many as 20 other partner platforms from YouTube to Veoh to TiVo, where people
were going to watch new kinds of video, and breaking the hegemony of the TV
networks. And now many others, including the big networks, are on the
super-distribution bandwagon.”

Scannell continued: “This
spring we closed our second round of funding, bringing in great investors like
Goldman Sachs and Velocity Interactive, to join Spark Capital and Saban
Capital, who participated in both rounds. With a newly bolstered board, I was
named chairman to go with my CEO title, and that’s given me an opportunity to
think even bigger about our company. And to that end, I decided, with the board
and my partners’ approval, to look to bring in a CEO to run the day to day of
Next New Networks.”

Looking ahead, Scannell
said, “I want to see us go beyond video by building up our web capabilities in
key categories, and move the company to make our sites and new offerings even
more robust for communities to gather and interact. Hence, I plan on bringing
in someone as CEO who has ‘been there, done that’ in building a web business,
and who will work with me as executive chairman.”

—By Mansha Daswani