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MTV Pulls The Plug On Embeddable Videos

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When NBC Universal and News Corporation-backed Hulu launched in Fall 2007, it was a signal that ancient television media might really grasp the distributive power of the internet. Not only were fantastic 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 really clamp down on the embedding of videos from the MTV Network. Days gone by 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 ahead of schedule 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 show 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 involuntarily incorporate MTVN’s high quality video content; you simply won’t find legitimate embeds from MTVN anywhere, in view of the fact that you’re already not allowed to embed the videos as an end user.

We don’t know yet why MTVN chose to pull the plug on the most helpful part of its API, but we do know that at least several developers are mad, especially in view of the fact that 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.

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