NME: Coming to your television

Oh, such exciting times of convergent media we live in. The NME is launching a TV channel, to be run by the Chart Show team. We're not sure, but we understand the idea is that it'll run the old Carry On Disarming video over and over again.

Or maybe not:

The NME publishing director, Paul Cheal, said the NME channel would be useful addition to NME.com and the weekly magazine, which has an average circulation of 68,511.

"Increasingly our mantra at NME is that our audience of 15- to 24-year-olds are incredibly promiscuous when it comes to media consumption so as a media owner you need to have an offering on every platform," Cheal said.

From a business point of view, that makes sense, but it's hardly a very compelling sell. "Watch this - we're expanding our offerings onto every platform". Mmm.

There's also, of course, a counterargument that, in a promiscuous age, spreading the brand ever thinner in such a clunky way waters it down still further to nobody's benefit. After all, Q TV hardly has any sense of identity at all and can't really do much to help flog the magazine, can it?

There's also a bigger question as to if there is any demands for NME on the telly - after all, The Amp and VH2 have both vanished, largely unmourned (except for round here) and we suspect that their proud guitar pop will probably be echoed on NME TV.

Getting into visual stuff makes sense for the NME - we're not convinced that means a 24 hour pop video station on traditional direct broadcast TV.