Considering how Sumter Redstone, CEO of Viacom, will go to great lengths to pull videos off of YouTube – including lawsuits – hearing reports that MTV will pull the ‘embed’ codes off their players doesn’t surprise me.
“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”, reports Mark Hendrickson of TechCrunch. “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.”
So the real question will be if this spreads beyond MTV to other Viacom networks, like Comedy Central and The Daily Show? And this add to the rumors that the music companies want to launch a hulu-like site for music videos. Also, their API was already broken as you can embed music videos (above) and not TV shows like Beavis and Butt-Head (below).