MTV’s Video Site: Very Nice, Very Late
by Peter Kafka
Posted on October 27, 2008 at 3:58 PM PT
Kudos to our sharp-eyed former coworker, Dan Frommer, who has spotted what appears to be a nice new rollout at MTV.com: a place where you can–gasp!–watch a bunch of videos.
MTV Music seems to be what MTV.com famously should have had, but never really figured out how to do very well (actually, it’s one of several things, but that’s a longer story).
But it’s nice to see it now, regardless: clean interface, embeddable videos, social networky without actually trying to be a social-networking site.
Dan is calling this a “Hulu For Music Videos,” but that’s not the case, at least not formally. Hulu, you may recall, is an actual joint venture between GE (GE) unit NBC and News Corp.’s Fox (NWS), created in large part as a foil against YouTube, owned by Google (GOOG). (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site.)
But the labels aren’t taking stakes in this site–MTV is just using the existing licenses in a smart way.
We’ve lobbed in calls to MTV and will report back if there’s more to say. But for now we can tell you that the site does have content from all four majors: Warner Music Group (WMG), Sony (SNE), EMI Music Group and Universal Music Group.
It does not have the video for the Killer’s new song, “Human,” which we can find on YouTube, though.
So we’ve asked our neighbor at Starbucks to pick a clip, and he’s taking responsibility for this one, which quite frankly, we’re sick of.
Enjoy:
