Why Doesn’t VH1Classic.com Want to Share?
I was intrigued this morning to note (via Lost Remote) that VH1Classic.com now features “thousands of music videos from songs released in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s.”
Now, while a lot of this stuff is likely available on YouTube or someplace else on the Interwebs, it’s great that high quality, full length versions of classic videos can now be easily viewed in one place.
Big problem though: the videos aren’t portable. There’s no Share button or embed code, in other words, that lets you publish the video anywhere you want. So therefore I can’t provide a visual example below to advertise VH1Classic.com for them. I’d love to show you R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” but instead I have to settle for a link. Alternatively, a quick search on YouTube lets me advertise for them instead (and maybe they’ll need it, what with Google digging in its heels in its copyright suit against Viacom):
I know why the people at VH1Classic.com don’t want to share. It makes sense on the surface. They want people to head to their site every time they want to watch classic videos, and then get involved in the site in other ways, such as posting to the message boards, playing games, and so on.
But the Internet doesn’t really work that way anymore. YouTube became YouTube largely on the strength of two factors: incredible ease to embed and watch videos on blogs, social networking profiles, and websites, and its related videos feature that goes something like, If you liked that clip from Porky’s, you’ll also love this scene from Revenge of the Nerds. These features propelled YouTube to become familiar to most people without ever needing to visit www.youtube.com.
It’s the classic “walled garden” versus “open platform” debate, which has been decisively won by the open platform camp.
Aggregating great content like classic music videos is always a good thing, which made me check out VH1Classic.com in the first place. But closing off the ability to make its content “portable” is going to hurt its chances for success in the long run.
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May 1st, 2007 at 11:07 am
YouTube grew huge on that model but they made no fucking money you dolt. VH1 isn’t building a craptacular site to sell to Google so why the hell would they want to pay for bandwidth so idiots like you can put their valuable files all over the internet?
I’m waiting
May 1st, 2007 at 11:24 am
Webmaster X - YouTube will make money (they’re experimenting with pre-roll and post-roll now). We’re all waiting to see how, and then the industry will be forever changed. Short wait, at the least!
May 1st, 2007 at 9:49 pm
It’s certainly not surprising that VH1classic.com doesn’t allow you to embed videos. A lot of video sites owned by big media don’t let you do that.
While I agree that these big media companies want to keep the videos on the site to get people to visit and stay on their site, I think there is another reason as well. Keeping the videos on their site keeps other companies from making money off them.
None of the ad revenue that blogs and other sites make from posts with embedded YouTube videos goes to YouTube. By letting people embed most of their videos, YouTube allows a lot of people to make money off them. You get things like MOG’s TV feature (http://mog.com/watch/tv) which filters hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos about music based on your musical tastes and allows you to watch them on their site. It’s not a partnership with YouTube or anything like that. It’s just a really creative way to exploit embedding.
As cool as things like this are, big media companies are not willing to let other companies make money off them without getting anything in return. To them, the positives of making their videos portable are outweighed by the potential to lose out on potential revenue streams.
If and when YouTube learns to make money from what they do, maybe the big companies will try to catch up. For now, though, they will be stuck behind the curve.
May 2nd, 2007 at 2:55 am
Sterfish, everything you write makes total sense… but I still think it’s a mistake for media companies to rein in content. If it’s easy enough and free to find elsewhere (as I showed very quickly with the R.E.M. video) there will be very little compelling reason for the end user to take the action to go back to the original media source.
I totally agree that this is a major problem that media companies are now trying to solve. The entire nature of the monetizing of intellectual property is in flux. Which makes things crazy and exciting all at once!
May 17th, 2007 at 10:56 am
[…] good recent example of not getting it is VH1Classic.com’s choice to not allow classic music videos to be […]