Why am I such a hater this week? I feel good, got plenty of sleep, had a great weekend after a 3 night run of Phish at Madison Square Garden. So why am I so down on two of the online video industry’s biggest launches? Is it just because I didn’t go to either of the parties?
See below for my take on the Boxee Box, and head on over to Will Richmond’s VideoNuze for a more thorough look at Vevo. But as usual, I agree with Will. Vevo is off to ea good start, but hardly prime time material yet.
It took nearly a full minute to load one of the celeb playlists, and then I was greeted with a full :30 second pre-roll. Waiting to see how long it takes before I see another one.
Audio quality is acceptable, but I’d love to know what bitrate the audio was encoded at. As for the video quality, that left a lot to be desired. Maybe they are overloaded with users checking out the service, but if so, they should have considered that adage about making a first impression a little more. Videos were choppy, although the audio never broke up even when the video did.
Having checked out the service on their site, I didn’t have the same issue with the lyrics button as Will did, but without knowing the rev share deal between Vevo and YouTube, I wouldn’t be surprised if Vevo wanted to have a slightly superior experience on their own site, or at least try to build their traffic as fast as possible.
Where I was most disappointed was with the HQ / HD functionality — which is to say that I didn’t notice any. I hit that HQ button a few times on each video and never noticed a difference. And its not like the quality was so high to begin with. Maybe the HQ functionality isn’t active yet? On YouTube, who provides the technology (from best I can tell from other reports), the player acknowledges that you are in HD Mode. On Vevo’s player, notsomuch. Videos from the archive (Michael Jackson “Rock with You”, Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger”) seemed noticeably lower quality than more recent artists’ videos (Fall Out Boy, Kings of Leon). Was this a conscious decision or just a random coincidence? Or just in my own head?
Lastly, I managed to break the player when jumping quickly through a playlist. Endless red dotted circle spinning for a couple of minutes before I had to refresh the page. And on my last leap through a playlist to the last of 10 videos, the video just failed to play, and I didn’t even get the “red circle of death.”
On the plus side, there’s your standard social media functionality for sharing, embedding and emailing videos. Noticeably absent, however, was any Twitter tie in for announcing that you are watching a specific video or playlist, or discussing the video, the song or the band. As a start-up, I’d want to be spreading the word through any and every channel possible.
I suspect that my disappointment comes mostly from the fact that I worked at Launch.com almost 10 years ago, where we were streaming music videos on demand. Sure we had to hard code the ads to the videos instead of dynamic ad insertion, rotation and frequency capping, but those are just petty details, right?
Other than some smoother functionality – particularly the ability to jump around a playlist, which I do love – I don’t see how Vevo is going to save the music industry from itself. Its a perfectly good website and service, but unless the record labels start yanking videos from everywhere else, I’m skeptical about their walking on water abilities.
On the plus side, its like MTV used to be. Music videos without the reality show fluff. And that is definitely a good thing. I’ll be checking back in to see how they iron out a few of the kinks. They could all just be hung over from the launch party……..thanks for my invite.