Do you sometimes find yourself wishing that there was a place you could go to just watch music videos? Back in the 80s, MTV served that purpose. These days, MTV and its sibling MTV2 are hardly channels anyone would watch in order to get a music video fix. MTV is looking to redeem itself in the music video department, however, by launching a new site Tuesday called MTV Music that opens up the company's massive video archive and puts it on the web for free.
MTV Music expands upon the music video offerings already posted to MTV.com by offering an entire back catalogue of videos that go all the way to when music videos were born. The library includes more than 16,000 videos, sprinkled with "exclusive" MTV concert footage and MTV "Unplugged" performances that used to be all the rage. And that's just the beginning. According to a blog post on MTV's Splash Page, more videos are being added by the day, so even if your favorite Paula Abdul selections haven't been posted yet, they probably will make it up eventually.
In addition to the consumer-facing side of MTV Music, the company has also launched an API that allows developers to build applications that make use of MTV Networks Content. The examples provided include creating a video gallery, a MySpace or Facebook app to send music video dedications to friends, the "music application of your dreams" made up of your favorite videos, or a blog plug-in to pull in various videos.
MTV Music may not seem like a big deal to some, but it's pretty major when you consider what's going on behind the scenes. YouTube originally stated in 2006 that its goal was to host "every single music video ever created"—an ambitious goal that the company hoped to accomplish within 6 to 18 months. That obviously hasn't happened, quite yet, and now MTV Music is way ahead of YouTube in the music video department. Ice burn.
Why hasn't YouTube caught up, even with a two-plus year head start? MTV is owned by Viacom, the company that filed a $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube for "brazen" copyright infringement in 2007 (the suit is still pending). Among other things, Viacom wanted to have full control over any of its content that gets posted—something that YouTube could not provide.
MTV Music is also differentiating itself from YouTube by being light on the ads. All 16,000+ videos lack any form of advertising except for banner ads at the top of the page, while Google is currently testing video ads on some of its videos in order to monetize the massive (and otherwise un-monetizable) amount of content on the site.
Like YouTube, MTV Music allows users to not only watch videos on the site, but to also leave comment, give ratings, and embed the videos on their blogs or personal websites. Here's a favorite of Ars Editor in Chief Ken Fisher... enjoy!
Friday, October 31, 2008
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