The fantastic promotional benefits of enabling video embedding

When you go to YouTube, how often do you see ’Embedding disabled by request’ on your favourite promo video. I guess the Record / TV / Movie company is trying to ensure maximum advertising revenue from YouTube or similar, or else trying to restrict distribution for sake of maintaining some kind of brand quality.

The above example is quite the reverse - Canadian cinematographer Jon Rawlinson recorded some amazing footage of the Kuroshio Sea Tank at the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan. The video is embedded on this site from YouTube, but appeared first as an HQ Version on Vimeo.

The video ends up being a prime promo piece not only for the video artist, but the band / music selected - Barcelona’s ’Please Don’t Go’, as well as the originl sea life centre weher the footage was shot.

I sought out Barcelona’s ’Absolutes’ album purely by virtue that it was on this amazing video, which was enabled for embedding and found its way onto various sites - on one of which I encountered it.

When I go to YouTube to try to embed the latest Black Eyed Peas video for example, all the good quality videos have embedding disabled - which I believe is actually doing a huge disservice to the artist. To attain the best level of success, artists need to ensure the most possible exposure to their art - to make contact with new fans and aficionados wherever they might be encountered. You can hear music on the radio, in a department store, in a restaurant, club, bar or at a party - the context is not necessarily the most important part, the most important part is the exposure - the likelihood of you reaching more of your potential audience.

Why is it then that so many companies disable embedding on their videos - surely by doing this, they hugely disadvantage the potential success of the artist / art by limiting the scale and scope of its audience?

In my life, I have picked up favourite tracks / album influences from almost every conceivable encounter - fashion show, swimming pool, cinema, TV - all these are potential influences, but the viral promotional nature of embeddable video allows you to increase your promotional impact exponentially. By all means you can have a high quality version of the video on the official artist’s site, but also make a version available to YouTube and Vimeo for potential customers and key taste-making blogs to publish and promote on your behalf - it’s a no-brainer.