Britney Spears and Un-Embeddable Video Clips

Posted on September 10, 2007

There are some events that celebrity and music bloggers cannot miss covering and Britney Spears' awful performance at the 2007 Video Music Awards is one of these events.

The vast majority of bloggers agree that Britney's performance was not good. Some say it was a bomb while others argue that it was not a total bomb. The song Britney sang at the VMAs was called "Gimme More." It received mixed reviews -- some people didn't care much for the song before they had even seen Britney's performance. The analysis of Britney's performance is sure to continue as more facts come in. People is already talking about how Britney is now embarrassed and Kanye West claims they were both exploited by MTV. That should keep the gossip blogs posting.

Music bloggers also regularly cover events like the Video Music Awards. MTV was smart enough to put the entire show on its website in segments which makes it easy to link to a particular part of the show. They did claim to offer embedding but when the embed code was posted into a blog and played the video wouldn't run. Instead viewers only see a message that says the video was only available on the MTV website. When are the big media companies going to realize that if they make short video clips available properly for embedding (even with a non-annoying ad) they are going to get much more exposure than they would by only allowing the video to be seen on their website? Here's what happens if you try to embed the video clip from MTV.com that contains Britney's sad peformance. As of this writing, it only shows a message that the Britney video can only be found on MTV.com. The player then starts running other performance from the show which are halted by yet another message sending viewers to MTV.com.

If MTV is going to go to the trouble to offer embedding, make sure it works properly and isn't some kind of bait and switch trick to get people to the website. Either it's embeddable or it isn't. Don't make viewers watch an ad, then not provide the video: that's obnoxious.

MTV should have simply noted that embedding was not available for this video. The video clip of the Britney's clumsy performance also appears frequently on YouTube, but it looks like it is being removed almost as quickly as it can uploaded. You can probably still find it periodically on YouTube by plugging in a Britney VMA search. There are also embeddable clips of the performance elsewhere like here on Brightcove.