Who Put The ‘M’ Back In MTV?
Tuesday, Oct 28, 2008, 11:33 am | In General
Its been over 25 years since MTV launched onto television airwaves and changed the landscape of music forever. Some (most actually) would argue that recently there's been somewhat of a decline of actual "Music Videos" being played on the station and its sister networks. Well all those nay-sayers can say no more because MTV has dived head first back in to the Music Video business by launching MTV Music. A brand new video sharing site the likes of which has been a long time coming. Not only did MTV pull out all the stops and release their ENTIRE video catalog onto the internet for free on-demand streaming and embedding, they've also built in some awesome community and social features as well as an API for developers to take all this data and build cool apps on top of it.
So when I first got word that MTV had launched a music video site, I immediately imagined a bloated, ad-crazy, pre-and-post-roll-sponsored-video-spot-filled page. I immediately thought back to the experience of loading up MTVNews.com for the first time and waiting about 30 seconds for all of the ".aspx?blahblahblah" to load in all of its required JS libraries and so on. However, I was HAPPILY, I repeat VERY happily surprised when I ventured over and first pulled up MTVMusic.com
The first thing you'll notice about MTVMusic.com is all of the content. MTV has put up its ENTIRE music video catalog online. All catalogued, tagged, indexed and listed in searchable, stumble-able glory. And as if that wasn't enough, they've also made sure to include "Featured Content" sections. (Currently hosting sections like "Vintage Videos and "Monster Mash).
To go along with all of this, they've also decided to put forth a valiant effort to include tons of social and community features in the service.
When it comes to actually watching a music video, everything is pretty straight forward. With a player similar to the of online TV site Hulu, MTVMusic makes watching a lot of videos a breeze. Users can also comment on and discuss each video.
Every user is also given a full social profile on the site. While currently this feature doesn't exactly serve a huge purpose, once traffic on the increases, I'm guessing it will get a lot of attention.
One of the coolest things about the whole site is that they are providing a complete developer API, full XML access to the site's entire catalogue of videos.
Here's an actual embedding video from the site, it is the first music video ever played on MTV when it launched on August 1st, 1981.
I recently sat down (virtually that is) with Sarah Strom, Community Coordinator for the new music video site. Here's some excerpts from our talk:
| JM: | So what exactly was your role in this project? |
| SS: | Well, I have had many roles in this project, my official title is Community coordinator for http://community.mtvmusic.com, but I have also acted as producer for the Featured Content on the site. |
| JM: | Awesome, about how long have you guys been building this project? |
| SS: | Years and years, I mean if you even look back on all the encoding that had to occur... |
| JM: | Yeah I was just thinking "this must have taken years to put together", that brings me to my next question actually, can you tell me what kind of encoding is used in all the videos on the site? Is it H.264 - similar to YouTube? or did you guys come up with your own new brand of encoding for this massive job? |
| SS: | We are currently re-encoding all the videos from 1981 and forward into h.264 in high quality, they should be available in January. Until then we have encoded them in Flash using the on2 codec. |
| JM: | Oh wow, glad to hear H.264 is involved. I've noticed there's a ton of community and social features on the site, more so than one would probably expect from such a young project, what are some of the things you are hoping people will do? Or what are some of your favorite use cases for all the social tech that's built in to the site? |
| SS: | Well we get many of our community features for free since we've adopted the Flux platform (also used on Tagworld) but the challenge is making sure the generic features make sense for a specific community targeted at just watching music videos. We really just want to get stream counts up at this point so any use case that involves sharing videos, recommending, commenting... The community IS the editorial voice for us. We as MTV have taken a step back and let our members do the VJing. To be honest most of the great use cases have yet to be implemented, for now, were rolling on an out of the box community ...for now. |
| JM: | You say you're really focused on just getting people to watch videos, how open are you planning on staying? I imagine serving all these videos can't be cheap, are you guys planning on always allowing people to embed the content freely? Will there ever be ads inside the videos? |
| SS: | Well it hasn't been cheap, thats for sure, but now we license the rights to the videos we have and at this point, we plan on allowing users to embed and share the content... Its important to us to give our users that freedom. As for the ads inside the videos, we really don't know yet. Its all kind of up in the air right now, one big experiment. We have gotten so much good press so far about it, and we are only in a soft launch. We aren't even sure who leaked it, but are super stoked about the feedback thus far. |
| JM: | Do you guys have any plans or thoughts for allowing users, independent artists and/or musicians to submit their own videos to the ranks? |
| SS: | Yes actually, looking at April '09, once we get all our artists pages working perfectly, we will then be adding independent artists into the mix... which im really excited for |
| JM: | That's awesome! Glad to hear MTV is supporting the little guys, well I think that's about all the questions I had for you, I guess I'll let you go as I'm sure you super busy, one last "pressing" question though, what's your favorite video on the site right now? |
| SS: | Oooh, tough tough question.... I am a huge music fan, and in working on this project, i too, like the users, have found that we have videos I didn't even know we had. I am a huge fan of, "Rock My Boat" by Dntel, but i am in love right now with "Land of Confusion" by Genesis, it cracks me up... |
| JM: | Thanks again for helping me out with the story, keep rockin! |
Wanna try it out already? - Be sure to head over to MTVMusic.com
I have noticed their new portal lately and I liked the design and the usability of it.
However, don’t get it twisted. I doubt that this is their ENTIRE music video catalog online. Although they have a lot of old stuff there, it is mostly mainstream.
I love, Soul, R&B and New Jack Swing and I found only about 20% of the songs I was searching for.
So it’s a nice idea and in my opinion it was long overdue. Now I am just hoping they will add some of the older videos from the 80s and 90s.
Comment by Simon — October 31st, 2008 at 8:16 am #