My latest Intertubes distraction comes courteousy of MTV.
Hard to believe, considering how far out of their core demographic I am, and yet here we are. Anyway, the network rolled out MTV Music earlier this week. It’s an archive of music videos, remember those?
MTV infamously strayed away from playing videos in favor of reality programming more than a decade ago. As a child of the 80s, I remember watching videos on MTV; I even remember when non-video programming was novel.
Remote Control anyone?
Anyway, MTV Music archive has a lot of videos, a lot. I read somewhere it was hundreds, but I’ve yet to search and fail to find a video. This move feels a bit late to the game; after all, most of the content could be found on YouTube or other video sites. However, the quality is consistent, and it’s all in one place, no ads (yet).
Watching in fullscreen is pretty nice, depending on your resolution, oh, and every video can be shared via embed, email or added directly to your favorite social network. Nice.
It may haven taken a while, but content owners are all moving toward easy and sometimes free distribution of their precious content. This is evidence of the principle of “data as the next Intel inside” posited by Tim O’Reilly as a tenant of Web 2.0 years ago.
Anyone who owns data that people want has an opportunity to win by making these data easy to access in many different ways. Closed systems have run their course, and now data and content owners are finally realizing how to stay relevant.
Anyway, MTV Music is a good way to lose a few hours to nostalgia. There’s nothing like music to recall the past, at least for me, and I happily bounced around the site watching old videos I hadn’t seen in, well decades. Case in point, this classic:
Remember when these guys seemed tough? Bonus cool points for the Eddie Van Halen guitar solo.
This seems like an easy win for MTV, and I hope they continue down this path and put other archived shows online. Lots of early work from Jon Stewart, Colin Quinn, Denis Leary, Adam Sandler, etc. all could see the green glow of my monitor.
You may notice that Rick Astley’s video for the infamous “Never Gonna Give You Up” is among the top-rated videos. Is it Rick-Rolling if you don’t bait and switch?
Your thoughts? Find the comments.
