MTV, Excite(at)Home begin online music partnership

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (AP) _ MTV and Excite(at)Home, a company staking out turf in the burgeoning world of ``broadband'' high-speed Internet access, are partners on a new site that offers music

Wednesday, November 15th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (AP) _ MTV and Excite(at)Home, a company staking out turf in the burgeoning world of ``broadband'' high-speed Internet access, are partners on a new site that offers music video clips, news and other content from the cable TV network.

The material that debuted Wednesday at music.excite.com is available to users with a traditional dial-up connection to the Internet, but Excite(at)Home promises better sound and picture quality for the 2.3 million subscribers to the company's broadband connection.

MTV's interactive division and Excite(at)Home plan to work together to expand the content.

Excite(at)Home hopes its ultrafast connection and a broad range of music-related content will appeal to the millions of people who have been using programs like Napster and MP3.com to hear songs.

``As we're trying to deliver long-term services into the home, one of the things we absolutely have to do is deliver users a comprehensive solution for not only finding music but downloading it, listening to it and storing it,'' said Peter Negulescu, Excite(at)Home's vice president and general manager of content applications.

The deal gives MTV a solid broadband partner and helps Excite(at)Home expand and define what it will offer as high-speed Internet services become more pervasive in coming years, said Arthur Newman, head of Internet research at ABN AMRO in New York.

``What it's trying to do is provide a different shaded offering ... looking forward to a competitive universe,'' he said.