As the popularity of DVDs decreases and digital distribution increases, one thing that I hope sticks around is DVD commentaries. This was a really neat feature that was never possible before: you could choose to watch a movie with the director or maybe an actor talking to you about it. More than a behind the scenes short or article, a commentary is an experience - like sitting down with someone who made what you're watching, talking to you as you both see the same thing.
Music video commentaries have always been something that we have talked about doing on the site, and the roadblock most of the time was just technical - how do you watch video with different audio? Syncing audio to video and then uploading it to YouTube or Vimeo is tedious and not going to work from a copyright standpoint. For a while, we were stuck.
We were stuck in the old way of thinking of commentary tracks until we realized that with new technologies available on the web in the last few years, we can sync a commentary track with an existing music video on YouTube. We built this new tool, and today we're really excited to release music video commentaries as a beta feature.
If you see a music video with a commentary track, just click "Play With Commentary" - the video will start from the beginning with the commentary track. You can even toggle the commentary on or off, and scrub to different parts of the video.
Unfortunately this is not working on mobile, but we hope to have a mobile version ready soon.
We're starting with some commentaries we collected at SXSW this year, and you can find the growing list here.
Also, we're taking commentary submissions. If you're reading this and you make music videos, we want your commentaries! Read through our commentary submission guide, and we'll add it to the site.
We're really excited about this feature and we hope that you are to. This is a beta, so please email adam@imvdb.com if you experience any issues with the commentary player.
