HP targets MTV generation

Printer manufacturer HP has announced new partnerships with the social network Myspace and entertainment network MTV.

Following the Print 2.0 strategy it announced last year, the company is looking to further associate itself with Web 2.0 and the explosion of user-generated content online.

“We are not in the printing business”, executive vice-president Vyomesh Joshi told the company's Imaging and printing conference in San Diego. “We are in the content consumption business."

Wielding a copy of Here Comes Everybody, the latest book by Web 2.0 guru Clay Shirky, which he called “recommended reading”, he told the conference that “We need to think about what is going to happen to every single media type – we want to take this transition as an opportunity... we need to make sure that printing is relevant.”

The company's partnership with Myspace will see printing tools built into the social network's pages from November. Myspace CEO Chris DeWolfe descibed it as “a landmark deal”.

“Users are all about putting their lives online, but all this self expression is locked up digitally”, he said. “This partnership allows us to unlock that content and take it straight to the offline world.”

HP senior vice-president Stephen Nigro said he expected the service to evolve.

"It's going to be a lot more than a print button... Over time it's going to be about allowing users to pull content together and create some interesting print projects," he said.

The partnership with MTV will allow visitors to MTV's website to print freeze-frame images from the network's online video archive.

With its conference opening on Monday as the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed below 10,000 points, the HP staff present seemed determined to put on a brave face. “The market is tough”, said Mr Joshi, “but in the last four quarters we had a $29.4bn (£16.8bn) revenue... People are printing. People are scared, but people are still printing."