Another day, another YouTube competitor. This week, while waiting for the release of Kid Cudi's video for "The Pursuit of Happiness", we learned of a new music video site called Vevo. Similar to MTV Music, Vevo is a music video site, but it's controlled directly by a coalition of record labels including, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, EMI and Abu Dhabi Music Company, with Universal being the first of the four to contribute material. But this time, unlike MTV Music and all the other YouTube competitors, YouTube and their parent company Google are actually helping them out by lending their expertise and aiding with the development of the site! To see if the folks behind YouTube were able to create a music video site better than the original, we played around with it for a little bit. Hit the jump to see how it stacks up...
INTERFACE
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
CONTENT
VEVO: Vevo is made to be a site solely for the music properties held by the four backing labels, so its content is going to be extremely limited to music. You're not going to find the latest Net sensation on there, nor are you going to find clips from your favorite TV show. But you will find almost every Universal and Sony music video ever made. They already have over 14,000 videos and they launched a couple days ago. Browse the genres and you'll find everything from electronic and hip hop videos to soundtrack and spoken word videos, if that's what you're into.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
VIDEO PLAYER
VEVO: When it works (things are still a bit buggy), and once you get past the requisite commercial and if you're on a pretty fast computer and internet connection, it's great. Clean, fast and clear. Only thing is once you try to skip to a later part of the video, it will probably freeze up on you forcing you to restart the video. And unlike all the Universal videos on YouTube, you can actually embed these on your site in high quality. Another cool, but kinda useless, feature is the "lyrics" button. Click it and lyric captions will appear on the screen. Pretty dope.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
VIDEO QUALITY
Vevo: Every video on Vevo is presented in crisp, high resolution with an HD option on top of that. It looked even better than MTV Music's videos, which makes sense as these videos are coming straight from the label.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
FINAL VERDICT: We understand why the record labels would want to create their own video site. The need to control their property is paramount, more important than user experience. Fortunately, they've created a site that has potential to be a Hulu for music videos, or something. Watching videos in Vevo's high quality player is a much better experience than watching it in YouTubes frequently pixelated offerings. Will we stop watching music videos on YouTube? No, but there's a good chance we'll check Vevo for a video first before we head back home to YouTube.
• CLICK HERE TO SEE MORE COMPLEX TECHNOLOGY POSTS!
