Vevo takes over YouTube 
Vevo, the spinoff of YouTube meant for professional music videos, has finally launched—with the usual sputter that comes with highly-anticipated website debuts. The site, which has been in the works since at least March of this year , is aimed at allowing the major record labels to put their stuff online on their own sanitized part of YouTube, outside the user-generated YouTube ghetto. Vevo videos are embeddable, though there doesn’t seem to be anyway for users to participate or mash them up beyond leaving a comment. Vevo is meant to provide an online clearinghouse for label-approved music videos–the kind of professionally shot videos that often cost half a million dollars or more and used to form the backbone of MTV. Vevo will be the exclusive distributor of these videos, and will handle all licensing and ad sales, although partner Google is handling the actual video hosting and streaming.
Vevo was just launched, but it seems they didn’t do their capacity planning very well as the site is very unstable. It is currently hard to connect to the Vevo site and when you manage to connect the pages load very slow and most videos won’t play. Vevo is not available in all countries. Most music videos were viewable by all users at Youtube but Vevo locks out everyone who is not coming from the United States. Vevo, the Recorded Music Industries answer to its business woes, launched last night with a star-studded party in Manhattan. It’s a new business model powered by YouTube.
VEVO sells all the ads for the videos, and while watching videos I?ve seen everything from pre-roll ads to the next-to-video ads YouTube users are used to. Since the content is all so high-grade, VEVO can charge more for ads, meaning more money for labels, VEVO, and YouTube (who?s hosting, and showing, nearly all the videos). Vevo lets the labels take a small piece of the pie back into their pockets. I actually think this is less evil then the old model of shutting down unauthorized videos on youtube and not re-posting them anywhere. VEVO is the leading innovative online premium music and entertainment service for consumers, advertisers and content owners that blends the very best in musical content with cutting-edge video technology and a thriving user community powered by YouTube. The content is made available on YouTube through a VEVO-branded channel, on VEVO.com (the service’s marquee destination site) and through a VEVO-branded embedded player.
Vevo’s experience stinks and YouTube should be getting slammed in the media for all the problems they have. But I think the media loves YouTube and does not want to make them mad. Vevo will take a similar tack to Hulu in offering “premium music video content.”. VEVO will be an EPIC failure because users like myself will not support it plain and simple. UMG has gone from the coolest music label in the world to horrible almost overnight.
Vevo President and CEO Rio Caraeff says the company is looking to hire about 35 people to do Vevo jobs. He says they’re hiring for positions including ad sales, engineering, accounting, music programming and others. Vevo is an immense pain in the rear especially for those of us looking for videos for project use, especially official Music videos. People go online so they don’t have to worry about advertisements, and commercials, if that’s where Youtube is headed I want no part in it. Vevo simply says “we have created a unique partnership. Vevo ony works if you live in the USA.
