OREANDA-NEWS. June 17, 2011. CTC Media, Inc. (“CTC Media”) (NASDAQ: CTCM), Russia’s leading independent media company, announces the start of a joint campaign with “Vkontakte” (www.vkontakte.ru), one of the largest social networks in the CIS, which aims to combat illegal content and promote “Videomore” (www.videomore.ru), CTC Media’s own licensed player. The campaign will have the tools at its disposal to search for and delete counterfeit video whose broadcasting rights belong to CTC Media, Inc.

The project recently began with the creation of an official “Vkontakte” public webpage http://vkontakte.ru/videomore, where moderators are given the rights to delete the illegal videos. Following this, the relevant videos are made available on CTC Media’s branded license player “Videomore” and on other official webpages belonging to CTC Media. CTC Media is in negotiations with the administrators of other such websites which post CTC Media content, to ensure that it is posted legally and is available on “Videomore” in the same manner. More than 3,200 pirated videos have been removed from “Vkontake” during the first two weeks of the campaign.

Askar Tuganbaev, Internet Project Development Director of CTC Media, commented: “Our campaign to replace illegal content for legally available videos has started with “Vkontakte” as it is the biggest social network used by our audience. We started with the replacement of the most popular content, recent CTC Channel premiers, such as “Boarding School”, and during this period, the viewership dynamic of this video on the licensed player “Videomore” has increased by 50%, with viewings peaking at 200,000 viewings per day. Based on the success of our cooperation with “Vkontakte”, we plan to continue this practice with other popular social networks. We also plan to use specialized software which will be capable of flagging pirated content and automatically replacing it with a licensed product.”

Ilya Perekopsky, Deputy General Director of “Vkontakte”, added: “We continue to systemically launch licensed content groups inside “Vkontakte”, this time without negative comments in the press. Broadcasting rights holders who delay any cooperation with social networks will, in our opinion, soon become outsiders in the market.”