San Francisco — Music enthusiast around the globe would be thrilled to discover that Vevo, a music video site co-owned by Sony Music and Universal Music, unleashed a revamped website today along with new iOS and Android apps, a move that aims to increase time spent and capture more social activity through integration with Facebook.
As expected, starting today visitors to Vevo.com now require users to login using Facebook, in return for which they are promised a “personalized, social, long-play viewing experience.” The change is part of a new “bigger, smarter, faster” Vevo.com website.
A new version of the music video website Vevo launched this week with deeper Facebook integration, featuring personalized playlists that are synced to the user’s iTunes libraries and Facebook pages, continuous playback of video, and a bigger player. As is visible from the screenshot below, the second biggest service providing online video has accepted its friend request from Facebook.
“The newly released Vevo is a personalized, social, long-play viewing experience,” a Vevo spokesperson said in a statement. “Now when you log in to VEVO using Facebook, we scan your day-to-day Facebook activity to create a personalized ‘Facebook playlist.’ For instance, if you have ‘liked’ an artist or shared music previously, we will add that artist’s videos to your Facebook playlist.”
Moreover, elaborating on the VEVO blog, Jim Macnie descrived that VEVO is rolling out some changes that makes it more like the Pandora of music videos. The first new change comes from Facebook integration that looks at the music you have posted on your profile recently and compiles a list of music videos based on that. In addition, VEVO’s iTunes Match scans your iTunes library and creates a playlist of music videos that match the artists you love. Of course, you can also simply search for a video, watch it and we will create a long-play viewing experience based on what you have selected!
Besides, the revamped VEVO site features a larger player and continuous playback of videos based on personalized playlists sourced from a user’s iTunes library and Facebook activity.
Vevo, which is a joint venture of Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Abu Dhabi Media Company, with licensing involvement from EMI, was the second most watched video website in January, according to comScore, boasting 51.5 million unique visitors, after first place Google sites which boasted 152 million unique visitors. Vevo also has a pact with YouTube/Google to distribute the very substantial amount of advertising revenue realized from many of these videos that show on YouTube.
Lastly, in another surprising move, the company has hired a national sales leader. Hal Trencher is a former VP at Yahoo, having managed teams selling music, entertainment, sports, and Hispanic audiences. He will be based in New York and manage Vevo sales activity in New York, L.A., Chicago, Detroit and San Francisco.