The jury's still out on Hulu's economics, but one thing's for sure: The NBC-News Corp.-owned site has been a huge hit with viewers, streaming hundreds of millions of free, ad-supported TV shows and movies. Will a new, similar service from Viacom's MTV be able to do the same thing for music videos?
New today: MTV's MTVmusic.com, a very clean, very simple, good looking site full of music videos and only music videos. Lots of older, classic stuff, too, like one of our favorites, Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing."
The site looks good and, in our limited testing, works great. And like Hulu, MTV also (smartly) lets you embed their videos on your blog, MySpace or Facebook profile, Tumblr, etc. (see below). It also has the requisite "social" functions like comments, rating up/down, etc.
While the design is clean, there's also room for one or two ad units per page -- currently house ads for other music videos -- and presumably MTV will be able to sell post-roll, pre-roll, or pop-over ads, too. All fine and good.
The question: Are music videos important enough to get people to change their surfing habits? Specifically, will people learn to go to MTVmusic.com to find/link to music videos? Or will they just keep looking for them in places they're used to looking for them, like YouTube, DailyMotion, Veoh, etc.?
Hulu won dedicated viewers because they offered something no one else did: A site full of high-quality, full-length TV shows -- many exclusive or near-exclusive to Hulu. MTV, on the other hand, is offering some exclusives -- live performances and interviews -- but also many of the same music videos that are already on the Web -- like the same Dire Straits video on YouTube, which has had 2.2 million views since May, 2007.
See Also:
EMI Launching Its Own Portal? Not Really
Are Half Of Pandora's Listeners On The iPhone? No
Music Publishers Keep Same Download Rate, Apple Keeping iTunes Open
