For years now I have been telling anyone who would listen about my plans to build a website based on music videos. “It would be everything that MTV is NOT,” I’d say. It would not only let you to search for specific artists or songs, but it would also allow you to save playlists to share with your friends or the world.. In other words, it would take all the great qualities from Napster and iTunes, and apply them to videos instead of just music.

Well I never followed through with those plans, but I’m sure glad somebody did. Recently a new website called VEVO launched that does all of this and then some. VEVO is a collaboration between internet video colossus YouTube and entertainment giant Universal. VEVO takes all of YouTube’s music video content, cleans it up – gets rid of the duplicates, Rick Rolls, etc – and presents them in a clean, easy to navigate interface. They also add-in some exclusive, *legal* content from the likes of EMI, Sony Music and, of course, Universal. As if that weren’t enough, they promise HD quality streams will be on the menu later this year!

I played around on the site and was very impressed with the selection as well as quality of their content. I found all my favorite artists and everything looked good even blown up on my 46″ screen. Previous reviewers experienced glitchiness with the videos, and I too experienced an occasional buffering, but it could just as easily have been my crappy internet connection. In general, the videos all played with no problem. There is the requisite feature to “heart” a song, artist or even another user’s playlist, so the site can give you recommendations of similar songs. They’ve even got a cool feature that puts lyrics on-screen (powered by TuneWiki) so you can get your karaoke on.

So how much does all this cool stuff cost you ask? They must charge per video or maybe run off of subscriptions, right? WRONG! VEVO is entirely F-R-E-E! The service is completely ad-supported just like their corporate parents (if you don’t know who owns YouTube, you can probably Google it ;-)).

This site is quite literally one that I have dreamed of. The fact that it looks this good right at launch tells me they (hopefully) will be here for a long time to come… and I will be right there with them! 🙂

Other reviews:

TechCrunch – YouTube Helps Vevo Overtake MySpace Music In The U.S.
PC Mag – Hands On: YouTube’s Vevo Music Video Site
LifeHacker – Vevo is Where Your Missing Music Videos Went To
BNET – Music Video Site Vevo Is Like Hulu But With a Better Business Model