American Idol - Official Videos - The Dawn of a New Era

It took 8 seasons, but someone at Fox finally realized the potential of the Internet. Not only have they made videos of performances available on their website americanidol.com a couple of hours after the show ends on the East Coast -- starting today, they have enabled video embedding. I think this is big news.

Fansites like Rickey.org can now use official video from Fox to engage our readers without the fear of TPTB looking over our heads, or YouTube videos suddenly disappearing. Our audience also becomes their audience (well, it's always been anyway, but now Fox is doing the dirty video encoding work). I embed content from MTV, Bravo and Logo -- and I know that this is a good thing. Open is the future. Open is now. If Fox was a bit more fearless, they could strike up a deal with Google and set up an official channel on YouTube. It will easily be the biggest channel there. Heck, they can even do Twitter.

Now that some annoying technical stuff are out of the way, we can be free to do what fans do best: obsess. We will still probably be FIRST -- because for some reason, you guys want stuff immediately. But ultimately, when the official videos become available, I will use them. At the end of the day, you guys visit here not because of the videos but because of me right? LOL -- Rickey.org is all a grand scheme for me to be loved. (I don't know if it's working.)

Fox has been so inept at this Internet thing for song long I am shell-shocked that I can now grab stuff from the American Idol website.