MTV, the world’s favourite music television channel, it says here, is getting into games – and how!

With its parent company Viacom (say it with a deep, gravely voice) having already bought up Atom Entertainment (Shockwave, Atom Films), Xfire (a sophisticated PC games messaging device) and Harmonix (Guitar Hero, Rock Band etc), MTV Networks is now ready to make an investment of its own – a $500 million investment over two years to be precise.

“As we take our brands narrow and deep to serve our targeted, niche audiences, we’re putting well over $500 million behind building our games business across all of the brands in our portfolio,” Judy McGrath, chairman and CEO of MTV told Reuters recently.

That old ‘narrow and deep’ thing is a chestnut of marketeers, who generally nod sagely whenever the phrase is uttered. What it means in plain speaking is that MTV is all about finding lots of ways to pick the pockets of their existing audiences. So fans of Pimp My Ride, Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica, Punk’d and, er, Date my Mom beware.

Meanwhile it has been revealed that MTV’s audience is more likely to play games than most, which helps explain this move, we suppose. Around 27% of Internet users claim to play games but the figure rises to 47% for MTV watchers. The remaining 53% being too busy dating your Mom, obviously.