Today Vevo, the “web’s No. 1 platform for music,” took a giant step away from YouTube, where its viewers consume most of its content. It took a giant step away from the web, too, and a big step back toward broadcast TV, announcing that Vevo TV will be an always-on broadcast-style music and video channel available exclusively on its own website and apps, plus Roku.

The new channel will feature music videos, of course, as well as live concerts and artist interviews, and Vevo promises exclusives and new, original music alongside old classics. No algorithms here determining what “the audience” wants: This will all be hand-programmed by real humans, Vevo says.

Source: Vevo

Vevo TV on an Android phone

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice in Wonderland said. Old-fashioned, even.

But Vevo has a method in the madness and magic in the formula. When everyone’s watching everything and nothing is particularly “on,” there’s a definite lack of shared experience, shared reality, and shared community that those of us over the age of 30 once knew. It’s the special something that happens when the Super Bowl is on and you know everyone’s watching and engaged in the same event.

“Just like TV!” as VEVO says.

Except, of course, it’s better, because it’s on your phone, your tablet, or your computer. And anything you want to watch but can’t quite fit in just now can be saved, PVR-style, to a “watch it later” playlist. But the TV-like part is that it’s a curated experience that you are, presumably, watching at the same time as thousands or millions of other people.

And that it’s a lean-back experience, as Vevo is at pains to make clear. Where the contemporary web and app focused media scene is lean-forward, “channel” surfing, switching from clip to clip to clip, Vevo TV is intended to be more relaxing, more enjoyable, and more able to consumed in the living room as well as the bus or train. In other words, from millions of frenetic monkeys clicking frantically on billions of 30-second or two-minute videos, to chilling out and relaxing to music and video.

The new Vevo TV is available today for the U.S. and Canada, with additional countries coming, as always, “soon.”

A Soundrop room on Facebook is a page running the app, which streams music and video from YouTube or Vevo at the top, provides for comments and chatting under the video, and features a social playlist with songs that people can upvote, promoting them to earlier spots.

Source: John Koetsier

A Soundrop listening room on Facebook

It sometimes seems as if a million startups focused on music and social, but I like this one. Soundrop streamed more than 500 million tracks last year as an app on Spotify, so it’s not exactly unknown and untested, and the app seems simple, fun, and useful. Soundrop rooms on Facebook are the exact same as on Spotify: Comments, votes, and songs playing are synced on both platforms.

Soundrop is focused on the needs of artists, saying “We help artists and labels accelerate their traffic and engagement” on its partners page. That’s smart, because as MySpace discovered an Internet age ago, fans follow where bands lead.

CEO Inge Andre Sandvik referenced that in a statement, while also acknowledging Facebook’s status as the world’s leading social network. “We’re excited to make Soundrop available in the main place where artists connect with their fans,” he said.

The company is headquartered in Oslo, Norway, but has offices in New York, L.A., and London. You can try the app at multiple musicians’ Facebook pages, including Matisyahu, Delphic, or Owl City. Or, continuing the Scandinavian theme, even ABBA.

photo credit: crsan – christianholmer.com via photopin cc

According to Nielsen’s August 2012 statistics for the U.S., YouTube alone had more than triple the unique visitors of any other site, more than 25 times the number of video streams than its nearest competitor, and more time per viewer than any service other than Netflix.

It’s really not a competition.

This mirrors the results from ComScore’s July 2012 results in some ways, in which Google held a 3-to-1 advantage over nearest competitor Facebook in terms of unique video viewers (156 million to 53 million). But Nielsen’s methodologies and numbers differ from  ComScore’s, and in Nielsen’s numbers for this month, Facebook trails Google unique visitors by almost 6-to-1: 138 million to 25 million.

(VentureBeat has reached out to Nielsen for comment, and we’ll update this story as we get an answer.)

TV is moving online, as we covered recently, especially via game consoles like the Xbox 360, set-top boxes, and smart TVs. Viewers on those platforms watch far more minutes than viewers on phones, PCs, or even tablets, and that’s where both Hulu and especially Netflix see the majority of their minutes.

Other data from Nielsen show that Netflix remains the queen of engagement, with viewers watching an average of 10.5 of Netflix content each month, compared to not quite five hours for YouTube, and 4.5 for Hulu.

One brand that shows consistent viewership between both the Nielsen and ComScore ratings is VEVO, with something like 45 million unique visitors a month to its music videos.

But the most obvious finding?

Anyone who wants to catch YouTube has their work cut out for them.

photo credit: The Matrix Reloaded

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Music video company Vevo continues to experience its fastest growth on mobile.

The service accumulated more than 1.3 billion streams from mobile devices in the second quarter of 2012. Vevo grew its monthly mobile active users by 33 percent sequentially to 5 million people. The company has also witnessed a total of 18 million downloads to date of its smartphone and tablet apps, according to data published this morning.

Tuesday, the independent music video company, created in partnership with Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and the Abu Dhabi Media Company, released a quarterly report highlighting viewership activities.

The report cites some of Vevo’s most impressive statistics. The company said that 103 million music videos are watched on any given day, and that 40 billion music videos were watched globally through its service between July 2011 and July 2012.

The service averaged 429 million monthly viewers during the second quarter of 2012, an increase of 5 percent from the same time last year. It also increased monthly video streams in the same period by 9.6 percent, averaging 3.2 billion streams during Q2, according to the report.

Mobile, however, remains Vevo’s most promising star.

The company said that mobile traffic was up 463 percent year-over-year, and that mobile traffic nearly doubled between the first and second quarter of this year. Vevo counted more than 450 million mobile video streams in June. Mobile users are also now watching an average of 15 videos each month, according to the report.

The YouTube partner is racking up the mobile video views through dedicated applications for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone 7, and BlackBerry Playbook, and through YouTube’s Android app. Vevo’s service also works in mobile web browsers.

In case you’re wondering, and we know some of you are, Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” was the top music video during the second quarter. The inescapable track racked up 125 million views during the three-month period.

Photo credit: Sean Molin Photography/Flickr

The Android-based video game console Ouya successfully completed its funding tonight, raising about $8.6M in total — roughly $7.6M more than its original $950,000 goal.

Ouya, the startup responsible for the project, gained more than 63,000 backers in less than one month. The campaign began on July 10 and earned a Kickstarter record-breaking $2.6M in its first day, hitting the $1M milestone in a little over eight hours.

“We were inspired to build Ouya because we disagree with the people that claim consoles are dead,” Julie Uhrman, chief executive of Ouya, told GamesBeat. “Consoles aren’t dead, but the thinking that has guided the console industry is outdated. It was time to challenge the basic assumptions of the business. The overwhelming enthusiasm we saw from folks like Jay Adelson, founder of Digg; Jawbone founder Hosain Rahman; Flixter founder Joe Greenstein; and [former Microsoft vice president] Ed Fries, combined with support of well-known game developers and the backing from the people who funded us on Kickstarter, proved that we weren’t the only ones ready to rethink the console business.”

Those notable backers include Marcus “Notch” Persson of Minecraft developer Mojang, Robert Bowling of Human Element studio Robotoki, and inXile’s Brian Fargo.

Ouya, which will require developers to use the free-to-play model in some way for all software releases, signed with OnLive to bring hundreds of games on demand to the platform. It also partnered with notable publishers such as Namco Bandai and Square Enix, securing titles like the Japanese Final Fantasy III (a first for home consoles) at launch, and other entertainment companies to incorporate services like Vevo, iHeartRadio, Plex, and XMBC.

In addition, Bowling will release an episodic prequel to Human Element first on the system.

“For me, personally,” said Uhrman, “the Kickstarter experience has been incredibly moving. It’s huge to see people rally behind your idea. I’m eternally grateful to the tens of thousands of people who reached into their wallets to back this project — and those are the folks that actually backed us. I have to assume that there are exponentially more people watching Ouya with interest and rooting us on from the sidelines even if they weren’t able to back us.

“Will we make history? We’ll leave that to the historians. Once the Kickstarter ends, we still have a big job to do.”

Ouya was unable to give us a specific number of units sold during the campaign, but it did provide an early ballpark estimate of more than 60,000 units. The system itself, which is about the size of a Rubik’s cube, supports up to four controllers (each complete with a touch pad) and is hardware hacker-friendly. It launches in March 2013.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

VEVO just provided its answer by giving 50 million music lovers in the U.S. and Canada access to the videos they love anywhere, anytime, on any device. That means iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry Playbook (!), and now…the mobile web.

Native apps are designed for a specific mobile platform, such as iOS or Android, and are distributed via app store downloads. While they can be richer, more customized experiences, mobile-friendly websites or web apps are automatically available to anyone on any device with a modern web browser…without a download.

VEVO’s new announcement means you can have this desktop experience:

On your iPad or any other mobile device with a modern browser:

…all without downloading an app.

VEVO has more than 50,000 music videos in high definition and is seeing 45 billion views a year on a global basis. The service is a sort of Pandora for music videos: Users sign up, VEVO scans both their music libraries and Facebook likes for music they love, and then VEVO creates a playlist of their favorite artists with maybe a few new recommendations thrown in.

Adding the mobile web allows VEVO to be platform-agnostic, letting its millions of users watch music videos however they want.

Another major benefit? Users who click (or tap) on Twitter or Facebook links to VEVO videos have a seamless experience, seeing the video in a browser, instead of being forced to enter (or even download) an application.

VEVO serves videos in over 200 countries via a partnership with YouTube, and over 200 million people use VEVO to watch music videos. However, it’s not clear whether this new announcement means that video will be available on vevo.com for users outside of the U.S. and Canada. VEVO has typically distributed internationally via YouTube. (VentureBeat has inquired, and we’ll update this post as we learn more.)

VEVO is a partnership between Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Abu Dhabi Media Company and has offices in New York, L.A., Chicago, Detroit, and San Francisco.

Image credit: Regien Paassen/ShutterStock