Face Off: MTV Music vs. YouTube

Who said MTV doesn’t care about music anymore? Sure, they replaced most of their music programming for reality shows like Run’s House and The Hills, and then axed TRL, but they’re trying. They launched a new video show FN-MTV with Pete Wentz and yesterday, they announced their newest website, MTV Music. It’s taken them a hell of a long time, but the original home of the music video has finally realized that people no longer watch them on TV.

A flashed-based video site in the same vein as YouTube and Hulu, MTV Music will open up the MTV vaults and allow users to play all their favorite music videos, as well as their favorite MTV moments like Unplugged performances. While we’re happy MTV has shown some serious interest in music videos again, we feel like they’re kinda late to the party. For our music video needs, we just hit up YouTube'why should we stop? To answer that question, we analyzed both sites to see which one should be getting our clicks…

INTERFACE

MTV MUSIC: Very clean, very attractive and easier on the eye than YouTube. It just looks cool. MTV Music’s site is anchored by three video categories: Most Viewed, Top Rated and the inventive Vintage Videos which features a bunch of classic videos.

YOUTUBE: By now we’ve all grown accustomed to the YouTube website primarily because most of us use it everyday. That said, YouTube has grown into an exercise in customization. Depending on your tastes, you can have the homepage cluttered with as many recommendation “modules” as you want. Or, you can get rid of all of them.

WINNER: MTV Music

CONTENT

MTV MUSIC: Unlike YouTube, MTV Music only focuses on music related content. So that means most of the clips are music videos and concert footage. The good thing is, they have a lot of content from the Viacom network: MTV, CMT and Vh1. BET is suspiciously absent. We’re sure they’re going to ramp up the content in the coming months, but most of the stuff on here, you can find on YouTube.

YOUTUBE: If it’s not on YouTube, there’s a good chance it doesn’t exist. Because anyone who signs up can upload videos to YouTube, their library of content vastly outshines that of any online video site.

WINNER: YouTube

VIDEO PLAYER

MTV MUSIC: MTV Music’s player is streamlined and clean like the rest of the site. However, under heavy usage it tends to skip and pause a lot.

YOUTUBE: YouTube has had time to test and perfect their player and it shows. Also, because of the breadth of content available on YouTube, their player has more options built in like the ability to show Closed Captions.

WINNER: YouTube

VIDEO QUALITY

MTV MUSIC: All the content on MTV Music so far comes straight from MTV, therefore all the videos are pretty high quality allowing them to still look good when blown up to full screen. It’s not as high as Hulu, but much better than YouTube.

YOUTUBE: One of the reasons YouTube’s player works so well is that the videos they play are of pretty poor quality. Even the videos uploaded by the record labels are very pixelated.

WINNER: MTV Music

INTERACTIVITY

MTV MUSIC: MTV Music makes an effort at building a community by allowing you to join and upload photo’s or videos from YouTube or your computer, which is surprising since we didn’t think Viacom would let you upload anything for fear of you putting up some illegal ish. The only problem is, the videos you upload don’t become available with all the other videos upload by MTV. You have to go on your Community page to view them.

YOUTUBE:YouTube’s strongest asset is their user community. Once you join, you can upload any video you want (as long as it’s legal) and share it with friends or post it up on your own site. You can also join user groups, subscribe to certain video channels, or even create your own user channel.

WINNER: YouTube

FINAL VERDICT: As a new service, and a Beta one at that, MTV Music shows a lot of promise. The design is slick and cool, the quality of the videos is way better than YouTube and we think after a couple months, when they unlock the vault and throw all their gems on the site (Jodeci Unplugged, what’s good?), it’s going to be one of the premier resources for music videos. But, as it stands now, there’s just really no reason to use it over YouTube. Or all the other video sites that play music videos.