Georg Cockburn

Something I have never really understood was why Viacom never managed to make MTV a successful online music video channel. Overdrive was a try, but didn’t really become a great success. After all it’s about mixing music and advertising in the right way for a smart audience. But MTV never managed to get the mix right. When it launched in April 2005 as MTV Overdrive it was a supplementary video streaming site to complement the regular MTV.com web site. There was critic from the beginning. And up till now music always remains hidden behind other content on MTV’s websites. That actually is the main problem: MTV never really thought about what music videos should look like on the web. The music videos weren’t there from the start - you had to look for them.

So there are others who get this thing right now : Take last.fm, which focuses largely on music videos within the community since it was taken over by CBS Interactive in 2007.

And then there’s my new favorite: Tape.tv - a simple site from Berlin concentrating on the obvious: on music videos. They managed to combine simple TV and it’s advertising and revenue model with online searchability, which the user expects nowadays. Then they partnered with Majors like Sony-BMG, Universal und Warner as well as with Indies. Keeping the design simple and focusing on the Music - that’s all you need for Music Television 2.0!