aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

An MTV renaissance?

Robert Young at GigaOM says MTV is poised for a comeback.

Generally speaking, I’ve bought into the mainstream blogosphere wisdom that it was a big mistake for Viacom to pull its clips from YouTube. I still see the move as nothing more than a negotiating ploy. But what if it is more?

Young says, “Viacom is doing absolutely the right thing” and quotes this press release as evidence:

You won’t find clips of comedian Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” and MTV’s “Pimp My Ride” on YouTube any more, but Viacom Inc. is laying the groundwork for its videos to be available to hundreds of thousands of other sites… In the next few months, Web users will be able to grab videos from nearly all MTV-owned sites and post them on their own blogs or Web sites, lessening the need to go to YouTube, the top online video service that Google Inc. acquired last year.

MTV’s newly-appointed President of Global Digital Media, Mike Salmi, says, “The move is part of a strategy to bring Viacom’s Web sites up to “Web 2.0’ standards… Part of that is allowing people to take our content and embed it and make your own things out of it, whatever they want.”

I might ask why Viacom is pulling the clips before they’re ready with their own site; that doesn’t seem “absolutely right” to me. But I could imagine that by making their “vast video libraries archived within MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, SpikeTV, etc.” available, exactly the “kind of “video snacks” that are so popular on online video-sharing sites,” we could see MTV reshape the web-video landscape the way MTV Networks did cable in the 1980s.

My two caveats are, 1) if they were going to, the roll-out should have been done differently - making fans mad by pulling videos from YouTube with only talk of an alternative doesn’t work for me, and 2) how are they going to handle advertising? Pre-roll ads of the kind the television-types use all over the net now are rejected by fans.

The ad industry itself should learn that interruption, clutter and irrelevance alienate viewers. The TV industry must learn that their content’s not worth half as much as their greedy little broadcast-monopoly manufactured-scarcity models suppose. They can make a bundle in small increments. Just look at Google.