Online videos (and a tabloid-worthy personal life) killed the untalented pop star.

Britney Spears is over. She’s amassed an amazing fortune based on limited talent and her ability to glamorize normalcy. Her unique trait seemed to be her hunger to succeed and her Janet/Michael Jackson-like performance skills.

But that was two kids and a rushed marriage ago.

Her performance at the MTV Video Music Awards were profoundly normal but decidely unglamorous. It was like a bad Karaoke night in little Tokyo. The lip-synching sucked. The dance moves were limp. She was sporting a beer gut, despite being dressed skimpily in “sexy” lingerie.

The most interesting part of the entire performance was to see how MTV is now using online videos to pump up its declining relevance and to combat YouTube.

In addition to the Britney performance, MTV’s website boasts Kanye West’s meltdown (he complains that a black man apparently can’t win an MTV award — with his bank account, I hardly feel sorry for him. I don’t think that his failure to win an MTV VMA is the biggest struggle facing the black male population).

And there was the all-out, “white-trash” slugfest between Kid Rock and Tommy Lee, both of them ex-husbands of the even more sordid Pamela Anderson.

Apparently, the fight was for Pamela’s virtue. A losing battle.

And it was all caught by MTV’s cameras and streamed via its online player.

Of course, I didn’t watch the MTV Awards. I read about them online in the New York Times and perezhilton.com, before redirecting myself to MTV’s website to see the highlights.

MTV apparently understands that you won’t view the awards on regular TV either. They’ve completely revamped the format to focus on the YouTube generation that wants more performances, fewer speeches, and all of it in short video snippets. And they’ve promised not to rebroadcast the show 100 times on their channel.

Instead they’ll let you stream it from their website, based on your preferences.

And they’ll sue anyone — in particular, YouTube — that attempts to broadcast their content without permission or a good revenue-sharing plan.

Once again, it’s clear that Internet is disrupting media — some of it traditional, and some of it more provocative and youthful like MTV once was. (For a less pop-culture review of the disruptive force of online videos, see Ollivier’s post (in Spanish)).