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Business News Deals Digital
Vevo buys video curation app maker, wants to utilise expertise for its own products
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 8 December 2015
Vevo, the music video platform owned by Sony Music and Universal Music, has gone and got itself an acquisition, buying up the company behind Showyou, a video curation platform which last year introduced a subscription offer.
It’s thought that Vevo isn’t especially interested in keeping Showyou running as a going concern, but rather wants to utilise its intellectual property and the knowledge of its team to enhance its own products. Seven of Showyou’s ten employees are thought to be joining the firm.
This has led some to wonder whether Vevo is also planning to go the subscription route, perhaps offering some premium or upfront content to those who pay, rather than just pumping out all of the music videos and original content in its catalogue through its free channels and, of course, via YouTube, which is where most people still connect to the music video set-up.
The fact that Vevo has long wanted to exist in a serious way beyond YouTube may also suggest that the firm is as interested in Showyou’s curation and sharing tools. Such flim flam could be incorporated into Vevo’s own channels to make them more distinct from YouTube, even for free users.
Vevo, of course, has been under new management since earlier this year when Erik Huggers joined as CEO, bringing with him a background in TV and tech rather than music. He subsequently hired former Radio 1 boss Andy Parfitt to leading on original content, boosting the firm’s credentials as a media player rather than just a music video aggregator.
Huggers’ challenge is finding new revenues beyond sharing in ad and subscription revenues on the YouTube site, and – of course – in keeping on side the major record companies which own his business, and who have become less keen on free-to-access digital services in the last couple of years.
Confirming the Showyou buy, Huggers told reporters: “With the acquisition of Showyou we take a significant step forward in re-positioning Vevo as a best-in-class product-driven organisation”.
