Comments on: The Week MTV Dropped Flash

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 18:27:32 +0000

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

By: Soapbox Jury

Soapbox Jury — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 10:26:40 +0000

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

By: lilkunta

lilkunta — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:55:24 +0000

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.

By: JD on EP

JD on EP — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 19:40:14 +0000

MTV site change…

MTV site change: Multiple issues here. Yesterday Ryan Stewart noted that MTV.com switched from lots of SWF to lots of HTML/JS/CSS. I tried reading the comments and turned away after a bit, because so many visitors felt so strongly that the old interfac…

By: John Musser

John Musser — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 00:52:19 +0000

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...

By: Ryan Stewart

Ryan Stewart — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 22:51:03 +0000

@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.

By: kuwamoto.org » Blog Archive » Design is about taking a stand - CS icons, MTV.com and more

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 22:31:25 +0000

[...] I learned, via Ryan Stewart, that MTV changed their site back to HTML. You can read about the reasoning and see the comments at the MTV blog. [...]

By: JT

JT — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 20:28:23 +0000

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

By: Brett Walker

Brett Walker — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:58:45 +0000

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.

By: John Dowdell

John Dowdell — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:24:24 +0000

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