MTV just announced that they would be allowing fee, online access to a large portion of their music video archive. The music video site is MTVMusic.com. Great news to hear… although potentially a little dangerous for productivity in offices around the world. From a content freedom perspective, it’s great to see MTV take this step at releasing content into the wild, and making it freely available. Now, instead of resorting to pirated, “illegal” videos living on youtube, we can simply turn direct to the source – better for copyright holders, and better even for users. Now we’re able to watch high quality, first run encodes of videos, rather than crappy triple re-encoded, blocky and muffled versions on youtube.

Youtube was originally meant to host user generated content, not copyrighted commercial productions, hence the myriad of legal suits resulting from users uploading copyrighted content to their personal accounts. So this move by MTV, and recent moves by Hulu and the major networks to allow users access to that copyrighted content in sanctioned environments is a step in the right direction. Sounds like my prediction of doom for Hulu might have been a bit off…which I’m glad to admit!

• MTV’s announcement of MTVMusic.com Music Video Archive
• All Things Digital says the new site is good, but late
• Silicon Alley Insider speculates on whether MTVMusic.com can steal YouTube viewers.

Plus, MTV has enabled the standard web video features – embed, expand, email – here’s the new embeddable player –

Update 2009-02-15 – Potential future ultra fail – MTV has restricted video embeds in their API, and it seems like they may start restricting normal web page embeds in the future.. hope this doesn’t become an industry-wide trend. Read my full blog post.