"Today" Discovers NBC's Viral Video - 6 Days Later And After NBC Has Pulled Its YouTube Plug

Last Saturday "Saturday Night Live" featured a much-loved Digital Short of Andy Samberg and Maroon 5's Adam Levine singing a gay love song to Fred Armisen's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The New York Times wrote about its success and 300,000 + YouTube views yesterday, meaning even they beat NBC to the story. Today, in the second half hour, Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira sat down with Andy and Fred to talk about the short, six days after the fact.
And for those wondering how they got Grammy-winner Levine to participate, it pays to have famous friends. Here's part of the interview:

Sweet Matt, calling it a "text number." Anyway, speaking of great ways to "stay relevant," the "official" NBC-provided version of the song, billed as an "SNL Digital Short," is no longer available on YouTube as provided by NBC. Go on, try to play it. Over at NBC.com,
if you look at the video section on the SNL main page the text next to the video's thumbnail says "COMING SOON, PLEASE STAND BY". The final nail in the digital coffin at NBC? They used an emoticon. :)

Comments

[WriterGuy]

11:20 PM on 10/07/2007

In case anyone cares, it's back on YouTube. Guess they worked out the clearance issue (though it was pretty silly to think NO ONE WOULD NOTICE!)

[Maria44136]

01:38 AM on 10/06/2007

Just wondering where you got that clip from the today show... do you have the whole Andy/Fred interview? and if so, can you post it? Thanks so much!

[rexsorgatz]

05:47 PM on 10/05/2007

It's difficult to tell from the way this post is written, so I don't know if you know this -- there's an entire context to why the video was removed. So here's a link:

http://www.fimoculous.com/archive/post-3248.cfm