Digital

VEVO in talks with Facebook

By | Published on Monday 23 January 2012

VEVO

Bosses at Universal/Sony-owned music video platform VEVO have begun talks about a possible partnership with Facebook, according to C-Net. The exact nature of the talks is not known, though C-Net cites sources as saying that Facebook could replace YouTube as VEVO’s technology partner.

VEVO, of course, is built on the back of YouTube’s video platform, and also benefits from YouTube traffic, with users of the Google-owned video site sent to VEVO pages whenever they search for official videos from the Universal, Sony or EMI labels. For its part, VEVO brings the content via licensing deals with its parent companies and EMI, and also sells the advertising that appears alongside its content, paying a cut to YouTube for the use of its technology.

VEVO’s YouTube partnership has another year to run, though it’s likely bosses at the video site are already thinking beyond their current deal. Whether Facebook would actually be able to provide the technology VEVO needs is debatable, and while being a semi-official Facebook video channel would put VEVO in front of millions of users, it’s arguable that being hooked into YouTube – the go-to place for video across much of the globe – is more valuable.

Facebook, of course, has been slowly building its music offer in the last year via strategic partnerships with various digital music platforms, encouraging users to access such services via the Facebook environment by enabling people to share their listening habits with friends and, following this month’s launch of the ‘listen with’ function, to chat about music in real time.

An in-Facebook video offer with the sort of big pop catalogue boasted by VEVO would be attractive to the social network, though whether it’d really be able to offer everything Google currently brings to the VEVO party remains to be seen – though if Facebook was to offer more favourable terms on ad revenue splits, the music video site would give any offer serious consideration.



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