The Original Music Television is Back!

This week MTV launched a new site, MTVmusic.com. The site takes it back to the original MTV – when the acronym stood for Music Television. This website houses only music videos. You will not find the latest in The Hills drama or who got voted off The Island here. This site presents 100% videos including old school hip hop videos such as one of my personal favorites, Me Myself and I by De La Soul:

As you can see the videos are high quality and have similar functionality to videos on MTV.com and Hulu.com. If you are not familiar with Hulu, it is a website that offers free, ad-supported video of TV shows and movies from NBC, FOX and several other networks and film studios. MTV Music’s comparison to Hulu has been echoed all over the web since its launch.  And while Hulu’s business model is still up for debate it is clear MTV Music is ready for the challenge.

From a design and functionality standpoint MTVmusic, like Hulu, is visually a cleaner; the site is very simple and (thanks goodness) is not over designed. Standard sharing and commenting capabilities are integrated into the site well, you can embed the videos on your blog, MySpace, Facebook profile, etc. Viewers also have the ability to join/sign in and make comments, view the number of people who have watched the video, rate the video, and add the video to his/her profile.

Destinations such as Hulu and MTVmusic differ from YouTube mostly because they house videos legitimately from sources like television stations, film studios and music labels.  No more searching for a video on YouTube and coming up with a “video” slideshow of images with the song’s audio in the background.  Don’t you hate when that happens!

While MTVmusic serves a real need the biggest questions at hand are:

Can they get users to switch or at minimum use their service instead of an existing habit of going to YouTube?

Can they monetize the site based on a  Hulu-ish business model?