The Week MTV Dropped Flash

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MTV Friday night and I’m reading feeds about RIAs. I’m not sure what that says about me, but hey, what can you do. This one is about the MTV reversion from their touted all-Flash site back to HTML. It’s interesting to see things like this happen. MTV is obviously a very media-heavy site, but going all Flash didn’t work for their users.

So what happened? Well, MTV lists a few reasons for the switch back. 1) It’s faster, 2) Simplified navigation, 3) Accurate internal search. What’s interesting is that a lot of the comments seem to miss the old, site. They don’t appear to miss Flash as a technology, but they liked the UI tweaks that were made with the Flash site.

So is there anything to be learned from this? I’d say the MTV Flash site was pretty well designed, but it still didn’t seem to go over well with users. The “native” browser experience is still important, so a blend of Ajax and Flash still seems to be the best solution when creating a consumer-facing site. Applications are a different story though I think.

Thanks to Jajajax for the heads up. More thoughts here and here and technorati.

[tags]MTV, HTML, Rich Internet Applications, Ajax[/tags]

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  • Ola Muldal

    I am not convinced though. A flashsite is not equivalent with a heavy site. You can just aswell make a heavy site in HTML/AJAX. It is about how you build it.

    If anything, flash can be lighter than html, with vectorgraphics and FZip library for extensive graphics.

    I would rather see MTV complain about real problems which exist with Flash compared to the native htmlexperience. This would be stuff like typography, buggy deep linking, Native clickfeatures in the browser (rightclick menu, gestures etc).

    What does autoplaying vidoes and amout and size of bannerads have to do with flash/html? What can you do with navigation in HTML that you cant do in Flash? Afaik this was the page Fantasy Interactive made for MTV, but i dont know if they did everything. But i know they worked hard to make this work, and they had implemented features like Deep Linking.

    I would rather have seen MTV keep on working with fixing the problems with the flashsite, than panic and just leave it. But hey, maybe we can get an MTVapplication instead. It looks like there is a demand for it.

  • http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd John Dowdell

    Thanks for the link; I hadn’t caught that elsewhere.

    Reading through the comments became too painful, I had to stop. An interface belongs to the people who use it, and once the designer inculcates a habit in the audience, the audience will resist the removal of their habit.

    A few years ago the Macromedia site went through a redesign, and offered search results via SWF display rather than HTML display, which took away some of my own finger habits when hunting technotes… I didn’t buy into that, either. Not a fun time for any web team when elements of the audience’s interface go away!

    (I hadn’t used either interface to the MTV services myself. Hmm, it might be interesting to go back and track some of the prior anti-SWF/UI conversation, see what their pain points were, and how they feel about the polar switch. Oh, Dan Cedarholm was on the team!)

    jd/adobe

  • http://brettwalker.net Brett Walker

    MTV’s old Flash site was slow. No doubt about that. It was bloated and torturous to use (though to be honest, all of their sites have been that way).

    I think this has more to do with MTV’s creative directors walking all over the creative technologists every time at bat, setting them up for failure. Obviously there are plenty of examples of rich Flash-based sites that are fast.

    Could the MTV site be content-rich and still be Flash? Yes. With a modular design, allowing users to customize their experience with only features they are interested in, you would satisfy the people wanting video video video all over the place, but also the people who just want to read news or browse artists at a more lo-fi pace.

    Do I think that going HTML was a better idea? Not really. MTV is all about flash (no pun intended) and sizzle, and you don’t get quite so much of that with HTML. I think it was an easy way out, but obviously the users aren’t so happy with the solution.

  • JT

    Well, at least it looks like they still use Flash video. Too bad though I think their new MTVU.com site uses Windows Media.

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  • http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com Ryan Stewart

    @Ola, you’re right, you can have some VERY heavy Ajax sites. I tend to agree, I don’t know why MTV moved back, but they did. I like Sho’s take (see his trackback).

    @JD thanks for the link to Dan’s blog!

    @Brett I think you’re probably right about the creative directors. I wonder how that dichotomy played out.

    @JT it does? I’ll have to go look at that. Maybe it has Silverlight potential down the road.

  • http://www.programmableweb.com John Musser

    Deja vu all over again. See Wired’s 1997 article The Navbar Applet Grows Up. I used to manage the tech team at MTV in those days and we pulled Java as a core navigational tool from mtv.com for many of the same reasons. Go figure…

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  • http://iwishihad1 lilkunta

    1st) I dont like how 1 has 2 a blogger or google account to post to mtv. I have a mtv.com & it isnt enuf? Argh!
    …So I’m posting here:
    When mtv.com changed 2 a flash site I stopped visiting. I have hi speed cable connection & was still having 2 wait 20 yrs 4 the page 2 load; IT TOOK TOOO LONG 2 LOAD!
    What kind of net connection was needed to access/use the site proprerly?They never did say. Of course @ theri mtv offices they have supercomputer & super fast modems. But we are in our homes /libraries/ sitting outside some office building hacking their
    wifi….so flash didnt work!

    I hated the forced video/commercial (which always seemed to be Madonna from the Music /cowboy era ) that would autoplay on the left shrinking what I was trying to look at on the right.

    Bc I never got the page to load fully, I never even got to use the bookmark feature ( I dont even know what it is) or the play a song/video while navigating the website.

    This version is SO MUCH BETTER.
    Thank u 4 changing mtv.com 2 something we all r able to 1st/even/just LOAD & enjoy.

    Also, the HAT bkgrnds is a cool idea. Good job 4 exposing new artists.

  • http://soapboxjury.blogspot.com Soapbox Jury

    I think the MTV site has gone right downhill recently anyway. Too slow to load and poorly designed.

  • http://torytom.com Tom

    Yeah, MTV has slowed right down since it became Macromedia Flash. Hardly worth bothering with nowadays.