The problem with quick and dirty...is that dirty remains long after quick has been forgotten - Steve McConnell
Youtube and Universal plan to release new music portal
By Fabio on Friday April 10th 2009 04:54 | Category: Web
Youtube and the Universal Music Group wants to join forces under the name Vevo and start a new video site. The portal should exhibit clips of famous Universal artists and must be funded entirely by advertising revenue.
The new site should be in the air within a few months and video clips of artists such as U2, 50 Cent and Kanye West are offered in a higher quality than is the case with most Youtube videos currently. Under the agreement, the music is owned by Universal, which in turn is part of the French media group Vivendi. The advertising revenues of Vevo will be shared between YouTube and Universal. Universal has also indicated that the talks would continue with other music publishers to join in the plans for a premium video portal, reports Reuters.
The two parties hope the creation of a new video portal separate from Youtube will attract more advertisers, and ad rates should be higher. It appears that the parties have looked at the success of video portal Hulu, owned by NBC Universal and News Corp.. Hulu visitors get served with popular TV series and several movies, and seems to commit larger advertisers than Youtube.
The agreement with the music publisher for Youtube, part of Google, is very welcome. Despite the high visitor count of the portal it just won't get profitable, since they should charge low ad rates. Besides that music publisher Warner refused to sign a new licensing agreement with Youtube and is therefore increasingly forced to take videos off-line due to copyright conflicts.
Besides the deal with Universal Cnet reported that Sony Pictures has confirmed to be negotiating with Youtube. The filmstudio would plan on serving complete featured movies on the Youtube portal to in term bring more visitors to it's own video portal Crackle. However users of Youtube would not be able to embed the films in other websites, insiders expect that Sony Pictures will submit just a few movies on Youtube and that they want to determine which advertisement will be displayed next to their content.
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