The ‘VMAs’ Will Stream Live on All Your Devices, But This Is a Show for the Big TV

TV today means watching anything we want on any device at any time, but some things are bigger than that.

You can watch Sunday night’s MTV Video Music Awards on your puny little iPhone, but that’s just ridiculous. Fire up the 46-inch in the living room. Tell the kids to put away the iPads and gather around. (You should be safe. I’m sure MTV will be using a 7-second delay.) Make popcorn or chicken wings or whatever you do for the Super Bowl and the Oscars. Watch live TV. The VMAs are what makes us Americans!

Erik Flannigan, MTV’s EVP for special events and one of the executive producers of this year’s VMAs, took a few minutes away from preparations at Madison Square Garden earlier this week to talk to Decider about Sunday night’s show.

DECIDER: How has the rise of streaming and social media over the last five years changed the way people watch the VMAs?

ERIK FLANNIGAN: For many people it’s a two-screen experience now, which was notable going back to 2009 when Taylor Swift was accepting and Kanye West stormed the stage. That was the pop culture/social moment that put mobile platforms on the map. The viewership has evolved a lot over the years. It’s now multicast on 10 networks, and it’s available on the MTV app on Roku and Apple TV and other places.

The moments from the show — commentary on Twitter and Facebook and the videos and memes after the fact — are part of the multidimensional ways that people consume the VMAs. Instead of two hours of television, it’s a week of intrigue leading up to it and days and days after of people following up. The VMAs were the biggest Twitter event last year except for the Super Bowl.

Do the VMAs generate much ratings lift the second and third days, or is it primarily a live-viewed event?

It’s like the Super Bowl, the Academy Awards and the Super Bowl — big live events that don’t generate much in DVR viewing. The DVR number for the VMAs last year was the biggest it had ever been, but you’re still talking about a low double-digit lift.

How do you expect the viewing to be divided among live cable, connected-TV devices and portable devices?

It’s a television event, so a lot of people are going to watch in on their actual TV. With the fact that it will be broadcast across 10 television networks, a big majority of viewing will be on TV. Hundreds of thousands of people will watch on mobile devices, and millions of people will see short bursts of it on mobile devices.

You did a second-screen feed last year that did not require cable authentication, right?

We did, and we’ve done that for several years. This year, there will be more promotion around watching as an authenticated user like you saw the the Olympics for NBC and the World Cup with ESPN.

Why not make big events like this available without authentication the way CBS did with the Super Bowl or even offering it as a pay-per-view event in addition to cable authentication?

That’s a question that’s bigger than the VMAs — about a la carte transactions for events. You could ask the same question about the Oscars or the Golden Globes or the Grammys or the Olympics. I can’t give you an answer that affects the entire industry to explain a single show on a single night.

Looking at the ratings for the VMAs over the years, do you see that as driven largely by who the announced performers will be?

Certainly, the talent booked on the show have a big bearing on that. This year, Rihanna is the Video Vanguard Award performer, and she’ll have an enormous with the year and the tour that she’s had. We think Britney Spears appearing on the show for the first time in 10 years will spur a lot of interest. These are the kind of shows that people who don’t watch a lot of MTV or a lot of music programming in general will watch. Each of those artists bring their own following, and the event comes with the expectation that you truly don’t know what’s going to happen. There are always cultural moments that everybody talks about.

Was Britney Spears’s appearance 10 years ago the one with the snake?

The snake was before the one that was 10 years ago. That was 2001, I believe.

Was it the one when she kissed Madonna?

No. [Laughs.] That was 2003. There’s more Britney performances than you think.

Is there a particular thing you always think about as a VMA moment?

Madonna and Britney, the Taylor-Kanye moment, Beyonce rubbing her baby bump. It depends on whether you like the pop culture aspects of the show or performances like Eminem coming out with a hundred guys dressed like him.

Are there any new viewer features that you didn’t have last year like second-screen features or new platforms?

The biggest new thing is that we’ll have two different Snapchat Stories — one in the lead-up to the show and a live Story with clips throughout the night. If the results are similar to Snapchat Stories for similar events, that will be another medium where millions of people will experience the VMAs.

MTV’s ratings has stabilized this year after a rough year in 2015. What do you attribute that leveling this year to?

Many, many cable networks are down, and cable is a hit-driven business. We’ve shored up the baseline, and we’ll have some new series this fall that will have the potential to pull in some new audience beyond the core audience that we’ve shored up this year.

Who are the major artists performing Sunday night?

Rihanna is getting the Video Vanguard Award and doing a performance that’s unlike anything we’ve done for that award in the past. Britney Spears is performing. Nick Jonas is doing a performance that will be outside of Madison Square Garden. Future has been one of the biggest stories of the year with three No. 1 records, and he’ll be on for the first time. Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj are performing their new song “Side to Side.”

Are you launching any new shows out of the VMAs?

We’ll be promoting a new music series that starts September 15 called Wonderland, which is our first live-music series in about 20 years. We’ll be broadcasting that out of downtown L.A. You’ll see ads for other new series coming this fall to MTV.

Madison Square Garden is a big venue.

It’s our first time there, and we’re really excited to be doing the show at the biggest venue in New York City.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider. He is also a contributing writer for Signature and The Daily Beast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.