A sneak preview of the song was released on the Selections from A Night Out with the Backstreet Boys CD on November 17, 1998 and had a slightly different sound to it, while another preview was shown at the end of Britney Spears' album ...Baby One More Timetwo months later. In a 2001 interview on The View, the group stated they never really intended "The One" as their fourth single. The group held a poll on TRL allowing fans to choose the next single from their album, and after Nick Carter himself called in and voted for "The One", his large fan-base followed. The rest of the group had preferred the song "Don't Want You Back", which had been leading in votes up to that point.
Music video
Background
The music video was directed by Chris Hafner and Kevin Richardson in April 2000. Most of the video is in widescreen format, though the within letterboxed black area are pulses of color based on the brightness of the shots. The choruses mainly feature two different clips side-by-side, further letterboxing the video. During the breakdown before the final choruses, the normal letterboxed image is split horizontally into four segments and different clips flash between them with camera flash effects on the borderlines.
Synopsis
The video opened with a dedication to the Boys' fans, crew, band, and dancers. The video itself opens with a time-lapse shot of the Bankers Life Fieldhouse, home of the Indiana Pacers, being converted from a basketball court to the band's stage for the Into the Millennium Tour, which is reversed at the end of the video. The remainder of the video is made up of clips of performance footage from the tour, and less notably, a number of panned still images and off-stage clips from behind the scenes, or from other promotional appearances done for Millennium. The footage is not specifically related to "The One", though there are a few clips of the band synced to the lyrics. A soundtrack of screaming fans was added to the album version of the song to give a live feeling to the song. Concert footage was from the entire tour, including a concert in the Bryce Jordan Center, and the basketball arena at Penn State University. There also appears in the video at segment of the Backstreet Boys playing basketball in Michigan State jerseys. This is because concert footage was also taken from when the band played the Jack Breslin Center.
