Nice post. Although I agree with most of your 'criticisms' I think you should take into account where both Yahoo and MTVM API's are coming from. Since yahoo music has all the information already available to them in one way or the other, given their years of experience selling music online directly and in their partnerships (rhapsody etc) and so forth, it's obviously easier for them to provide something like album title or whatever else they'd like to provide in their APIs.They just have to pull it from existing databases.
Personally I don't miss that information from the MTVM API. I'm not one of those people that has to link everything to their amazon associates account, payout from amazon is ridiculous anyway for music as well as books.
Comparing MTVM with Yahoo Video at this early stage is a bit unfair. I'm pretty happy with the MTVM so far.
The biggest annoyance is the geographical restrictions and the way they are not really dealt with by MTVM expecting us to deal with it ourselves. It's pretty frustrating ending up with a full page of search results for radiohead and then not being able to view one single video. Without any feedback in the player. This should be dealt with either by the search or by the player, given a default "Sorry this video is not available for your country" instead of a white rectangle. Seeing what is going on on youtube lately, where all of a sudden most videos that I used to watch suddenly have become "restricted" as well, that is not exactly very inviting to keep using the site. This is the major issue that will drive your visitors away out of sheer frustration.
I'm having good fun with the API and my visitors are enjoying it, but youtube should have taught us one thing, it is not exactly a viable "business model" for those looking for ways to monetise their every keystroke. I only hope that they don't ruin it all before too long with obnoxious advertising. If the MTV site itself is something to go by, the amount of advertising there is downright insulting. If that ever comes to MTVM API videos I'll pull the plug in no time.
I never used the Yahoo API, and wanted to look into it, but since I read in your post that they have advertising I'm not even interested anymore.There's no beating around the bush here, the "commercialisation" is what "killed" the original MTV in the first place. I'm still baffled everytime I zap through my TV channels and pass MTV with what they currently have going there, I used to be glued to the tube in the 80s enjoying every crazy minute of early days MTV. Seems like every counterculture turns into its opposite pretty fast. To think that it's the 60s generation that is now running and ruining the country and the world, makes woodstock even more of an oddity. Anyway.
I don't use Ruby so I can't say anything about your library.
Cheers
=M=
Unknown – 1 year ago
Thanks for your response, mephisto--it's good to hear another voice on this :)
What's interesting about Yahoo! is that Y! Music is relatively new compared to MTV. Y! Music came about primarily from its 2004 acquisition of MusicMatch. Having been a big player for nearly 30 years, I would have expected MTV to have a pretty significant database to pull from, built over so many partnerships with record companies.
Yes, Yahoo! music videos are nearly unwatchable because of the ads. However, on the matter of YouTube, we have to remember that it was Viacom, MTV's parent company, that sued YouTube for $1 Billion, forcing the takedown of 10,000's of videos in the first place. If Viacom is going to force me to eat its dog food to watch music videos, it better damn well be well done.
That said, I think the MTV API is a step in the right direction, and it's my hope that a little tough love and constructive criticism is what it takes to bring this to the next level.
you said: "Y! Music is relatively new compared to MTV"
That is of course correct, stated like that. Like most content providers Viacom (MTV) was caught sleeping at the wheel.
As far as internet presence and development is concerned Y! has a big lead by now because of that.
My first thought when I heard about the MTV API was, so that's why youtube had to be sued.
At first that didn't make much sense to me at all, but now of course it is perfectly understandable and even justifiable I think.
Looks like youtube is going into a direction I don't really like anyway. The restrictions there are getting more and more annoying. Google something and you'll get a result on youtube, click the link and you'll get a "Sorry, not available in your country" error page if you're not in the US or Canada. Dailymotion is definitely catching up, especially as far as music videos is concerned, and the quality of their videos is far better as well, with major labels like UNIVERSAL gradually uploading their entire catalog, all in stereo and very good audio and video quality. YouTube may have started the game, but it looks like they lost the ball a while ago...
"Do No Evil" Google has taken a couple of turns the last couple of years that I find very questionable. Just because you have a lot of money like they do, that doesn't necessarily bring about good decisions.
For me the combination of MTVM and Dailymotion is just perfect. They are very complementary to each other.
I just published an in-depth look into the MTV API on my personal blog, which you can check out at http://matttthompson.com/2008/11/i-want-my-mtv-api/
As a part of my research, I put together a Ruby wrapper around the API: http://github.com/mattt/mtv-music/
Let me know what you think about my article, or if you got any use out of the library.
Cheers,
Mattt
Tags
mephisto – 1 year ago
Nice post. Although I agree with most of your 'criticisms' I think you should take into account where both Yahoo and MTVM API's are coming from. Since yahoo music has all the information already available to them in one way or the other, given their years of experience selling music online directly and in their partnerships (rhapsody etc) and so forth, it's obviously easier for them to provide something like album title or whatever else they'd like to provide in their APIs.They just have to pull it from existing databases.
Personally I don't miss that information from the MTVM API. I'm not one of those people that has to link everything to their amazon associates account, payout from amazon is ridiculous anyway for music as well as books.
Comparing MTVM with Yahoo Video at this early stage is a bit unfair. I'm pretty happy with the MTVM so far.
The biggest annoyance is the geographical restrictions and the way they are not really dealt with by MTVM expecting us to deal with it ourselves. It's pretty frustrating ending up with a full page of search results for radiohead and then not being able to view one single video. Without any feedback in the player. This should be dealt with either by the search or by the player, given a default "Sorry this video is not available for your country" instead of a white rectangle. Seeing what is going on on youtube lately, where all of a sudden most videos that I used to watch suddenly have become "restricted" as well, that is not exactly very inviting to keep using the site. This is the major issue that will drive your visitors away out of sheer frustration.
I'm having good fun with the API and my visitors are enjoying it, but youtube should have taught us one thing, it is not exactly a viable "business model" for those looking for ways to monetise their every keystroke. I only hope that they don't ruin it all before too long with obnoxious advertising. If the MTV site itself is something to go by, the amount of advertising there is downright insulting. If that ever comes to MTVM API videos I'll pull the plug in no time.
I never used the Yahoo API, and wanted to look into it, but since I read in your post that they have advertising I'm not even interested anymore.There's no beating around the bush here, the "commercialisation" is what "killed" the original MTV in the first place. I'm still baffled everytime I zap through my TV channels and pass MTV with what they currently have going there, I used to be glued to the tube in the 80s enjoying every crazy minute of early days MTV. Seems like every counterculture turns into its opposite pretty fast. To think that it's the 60s generation that is now running and ruining the country and the world, makes woodstock even more of an oddity. Anyway.
I don't use Ruby so I can't say anything about your library.
Cheers
=M=
Unknown – 1 year ago
Thanks for your response, mephisto--it's good to hear another voice on this :)
What's interesting about Yahoo! is that Y! Music is relatively new compared to MTV. Y! Music came about primarily from its 2004 acquisition of MusicMatch. Having been a big player for nearly 30 years, I would have expected MTV to have a pretty significant database to pull from, built over so many partnerships with record companies.
Yes, Yahoo! music videos are nearly unwatchable because of the ads. However, on the matter of YouTube, we have to remember that it was Viacom, MTV's parent company, that sued YouTube for $1 Billion, forcing the takedown of 10,000's of videos in the first place. If Viacom is going to force me to eat its dog food to watch music videos, it better damn well be well done.
That said, I think the MTV API is a step in the right direction, and it's my hope that a little tough love and constructive criticism is what it takes to bring this to the next level.
Mattt
mephisto – 1 year ago
you said: "Y! Music is relatively new compared to MTV"
That is of course correct, stated like that. Like most content providers Viacom (MTV) was caught sleeping at the wheel.
As far as internet presence and development is concerned Y! has a big lead by now because of that.
My first thought when I heard about the MTV API was, so that's why youtube had to be sued.
At first that didn't make much sense to me at all, but now of course it is perfectly understandable and even justifiable I think.
Looks like youtube is going into a direction I don't really like anyway. The restrictions there are getting more and more annoying. Google something and you'll get a result on youtube, click the link and you'll get a "Sorry, not available in your country" error page if you're not in the US or Canada. Dailymotion is definitely catching up, especially as far as music videos is concerned, and the quality of their videos is far better as well, with major labels like UNIVERSAL gradually uploading their entire catalog, all in stereo and very good audio and video quality. YouTube may have started the game, but it looks like they lost the ball a while ago...
"Do No Evil" Google has taken a couple of turns the last couple of years that I find very questionable. Just because you have a lot of money like they do, that doesn't necessarily bring about good decisions.
For me the combination of MTVM and Dailymotion is just perfect. They are very complementary to each other.