When NBC Universal and News Corporation-backed Hulu launched in Fall 2007, it was a signal that old television media might actually grasp the distributive power of the internet. Not only were great programs made available for free as streaming videos, users could grab and embed them anywhere online – in their entirety or just as clips.
So it’s a bit of a shame to see another giant media conglomerate, Viacom, buck this trend and actually clamp down on the embedding of videos from the MTV Network. Yesterday in a post to its developer blog, a staff member for MTVN developer services announced that video embeds would no longer be available through MTV’s API, starting sometime in early March.
Currently, developers can build websites that embed videos from MTV, VH1, CMT and Logo (such as this one that also embeds videos from YouTube). But soon developers will be allowed to display only thumbnails and meta data associated with MTV’s videos. If users want to watch the actual videos, they’ll have to follow links back to webpages that are owned and monetized by MTVN.
This not only means that developers can no longer build websites that automatically incorporate MTVN’s high quality video content; you simply won’t find legitimate embeds from MTVN anywhere, since you’re already not allowed to embed the videos as an end user.
We don’t know yet why MTVN decided to pull the plug on the most useful part of its API, but we do know that at least several developers are angry, especially since they helped MTVN debug the API only to see their capabilities limited. We’ve sent an email to the staff member who posted the announcement and hope to hear back from him soon.
Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
Related posts:
- Hulu Pulls Its Videos from TV.com It has now been confirmed that Hulu.com has indeed pulled...
- Google Pulls The Plug On Its Radio Ads; Retreats To What It Knows Best Google is pulling the plug on its Google Audio...
- Yahoo Quietly Pulls The Plug On Geocities Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Yahoo!...
- ViVu Launches Video Collaboration Plug-In For Skype ViVu, an online video conferencing platform, has launched an...
- SearchMonkey Keeps Getting Smarter: Now Embeds Videos, Games, and Documents Yahoo today announced a new feature for SearchMonkey that makes...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.