that’s whacked

MTV Music API

Thursday, Oct 30. 2008  –  Category: Songbird

I’ve been futzing around and exploring MTV Music’s new APIs lately. In a testament to how easy both the MTV Music and the mashTape Provider API is (okay, granted, I’m biased on the mashTape one… but still)… I threw together an MTV Music Video mashTape add-on. This add-on adds MTV Music Videos to mashTape’s Video Tab… letting you see full-length, high quality original artist music videos.

All I have to say is that it’s awesome. MTV deserves serious kudos for opening up such a fantastic and powerful API free of the usual red tape and crap that many APIs come with. Honestly, I was expecting a much more restrictive API with badges, and app keys, and embedding restrictions ( iMeem, I’m looking at you), and all that. And, I’ll just say it… I had really low expectations given this was coming from MTV. My impression of MTV lately is that they just don’t “get it”. “it” being music on the Internet, and in the age of Web 2.0.

Fortunately I was horribly horribly wrong, and I’m quite pleased with the new API. The only thing missing is external script control of the player, which I asked about. Hopefully it’ll come soon.