Ted Chan

I just found out about YouTube’s Vevo and was playing around with it a little bit. Here’s my quick review of the site. It reminds me of hulu, but for music. I like hulu so that’s a plus.

I had to sit through a 15 second AT&T commercial before I could watch the video clip. I don’t like commercials too much but can understand why they have them in there.
15 seconds seems a bit long for a 3 to 5 minute music video clip though. I’d like a 10 second clip; or maybe a way to build up watching of longer commercials to not have to sit through a commercial for each video.

The picture quality looks pretty good. Not sure what the native resolution is for it. In my quick readings the early sentiment said there wasn’t an HD version of the videos, but video quality was good.

I watched the 50 Cent – Do You Think About Me Premier Video. You can take a look at a couple of the screen captures that I have added below:

50 Cent Premier Do You Think About Me Video on Vevo navigation

One interesting thing is that there’s a logo for Amazon on the right hand bar, but the link redirects to iTunes to purchase 50 Cent’s new Album “Before I Self Destruct (Deluxe Version)”

50 Cent - Before I Self Destruct in iTunes

50 Cent on Vevo with Lyrics Enabled

I like the lyrics function. I’m not sure if that is part of google / youtube’s new captioning effort see NY Times article Google to Add Captions, Improving YouTube Videos that involved transcribing.

You can read more news about Vevo at:

Mashable shows Vevo Details
PC Mag’s Hands On: YouTube’s Vevo Music Video Site

From this article it seems that Universal Music Group has been in talks for awhile and working on this for some time. Since April 2009 at least…
Vevo Lives: YouTube, Universal Announce New Music Video JV

There’s also the VEVO channel on youtube itself:
YouTuve’s VEVO Channel

I’m not sure how this will affect mashups of videos on youtube, but it probably means the end of the wild wild west of videos on youtube. We’ll have to see how things go as YouTube rolls this out and it gets some more traction.

I definitely like the quality of the videos, and being able to link to a video without having to update or change links for violating TOS of youtube or copyright infringement.

Let me know what you think about Vevo