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A note about MMA clips on ESPN’s Youtube channel

By Zach Arnold | August 26, 2009

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In the past couple of weeks on the site, I’ve expressed my frustration with ESPN turning off embedding of video clips that they put on YouTube. What is the point of putting videos on the Youtube channel if you don’t want them to go viral? Unlike a lot of sports bloggers, I don’t hate ESPN and if anything, I wanted to be able to embed MMA Live clips weekly on the site. Instead, I can’t.

However, in the past couple of weeks, I’ve discovered something interesting going on with the ESPN Youtube channel. After they turned off embedding of Youtube clips, I noticed that the video clips are not being hosted on the Youtube site. When you play a standard Youtube clip, you will see that the video is being loaded from a Google server. Well, when you play an ESPN clip on Youtube, you will notice that Disney’s go.com server is being called to load the clip. It results in a slower load time and doesn’t do much at all in terms of having exclusive content on Youtube for users to share online.

ESPN’s Youtube channel has went from a standard Youtube-hosted video channel to a video channel with clips that can’t be embedded to a ‘video channel’ with clips that can’t be embedded and are hosted on Go.com servers instead of Youtube. Other than having a glorified RSS feed menu for ESPN clips on Youtube, what is the point of the channel? I’m mystified at what is going on and extremely disappointed that I cannot embed or link to MMA content that the network is claiming to display on the Youtube channel.

Update (8/26): Some interesting quirks on their YouTube channel. Some videos are now embeddable, while most aren’t. Some videos, when you click on their RSS feed, ask you to log into YouTube/Google in order to view it – including their Brett Favre spoof commercial directly on the channel.

Topics: Media, MMA, Zach Arnold | 11 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |

11 Responses to “A note about MMA clips on ESPN’s Youtube channel”

  1. Mike says:

    You can’t view it from other countries either – at least you couldn’t last time I checked.

    My only suggestion is that they have content partners such as Sherdog who post up the MMA Live videos. Perhaps Sherdog don’t want the videos up on every MMA site because it would reduce the number of people viewing MMA Live from their site. Very tenuous though.

    I just hope that MMA Live ends up on the UK ESPN channel.

  2. jr says:

    ESPN should realize that a blog embed of a video is like getting free ads on tv or talk radio. They are so short sighted

  3. James says:

    Big shock, ESPN, the same place that makes you pay for content that was once free.

  4. 45 Huddle says:

    Wouldn’t it be nice to have one website with all the online videos! Is that too much to ask for? Every company wants their content controlled too much. I don’t think they realize that it is actually better to put the videos out there and leave it at that.

    Now, there is obviously restrictions to that like movies and certain content that makes sense to have it paid for. But these regular videos have no reason to have any restrictions on them.

    The big problem is that these major companies are run by guys who are over 40, who don’t understand the internet.

  5. 45 Huddle says:

    According to Dave Meltzer, UFC 101 is trending over 1 Million PPV Buys. No doubt due to the success of UFC 100.

  6. 45 Huddle says:

    Fedor Emelianenko vs. Brett Rogers has been announced by Scott Coker.

    While this is a better fight then Fedor/Werdum, it doesn’t make much sense to make this the first one.

    If this fight was on CBS, I would say it makes sense. Since it is going to be on Showtime, they should of done Fedor/Werdum, and then moved towards Fedor/Rogers and then Fedor/Overeem.

  7. Ivan Trembow says:

    I’m looking forward to Fedor vs. Rogers and I’m glad that the Ricco Rodriguez rumors ended up being unfounded. That would have sucked.

  8. Alan Conceicao says:

    Rogers/Fedor is the fight most want to see that they can do, and it will be free (or at least, just on Showtime). When it comes to people’s top tens, ratings wise its probably a closer fight than Carwin/Lesnar, but heck if anyone will admit that piece of hilarity in between bashing this.

  9. Mr.Roadblock says:

    I hope Rogers KOs Fedor in the first round. I think that would be poetic justice.

    Alan, would say Fedor/Rogers and Brock/Carwin are mirror images of each other. The two top guys vs two slightly overrated, undefeated prospects. Both challengers pose style issues to the champs. Should be two fun fights.

    But if you really want to be snarky about it and use MMA math to say one is better than the other, then Carwin beating Gonzaga is more impressive than Rogers beating Arlovski.

  10. Alan Conceicao says:

    I totally agree. I look forward to watching both, actually. I just think its funny to see so many of the “Wow Brock/Carwin, great fight!” people trashing this one as uncompetitive. In theory, they both should be. I think Carwin/Lesnar is very, very much so. Its not just a huge test for Carwin. Its the best guy Lesnar’s fought yet too.

  11. […] a ton of bloggers at ESPN HQ this week in Bristol: Someone reading this please tell them to ‘normalize‘ their Youtube channel videos. They are shooting themselves in the foot […]

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