The problem with a lot of the music video channels like MTV, VH1, and BET today is that they don’t actually play music videos that often. They are too busy shows with fist-pumping Italians, the opportunity to fall in love in with Flava Flav, and the Phat Girlz. I believe that Vevo would make up for the lack of music videos on TV. This is why I thought it was great news when Vevo was in talks with cable carriers to become a channel.

News Corporation (NASDAQ:NWSA) is rumored to be in talks to hand off MySpace.com to Vevo.com. Vevo.com is an online music video website that is partially owned by some of the top record companies. The talks are currently in preliminary stages and an agreement may not be reached.

SongKick is a United Kingdom based company that has raised $1.8 million in their fourth round of funding according to an SEC filing. SongKick is aiming to build an IMDB-like service with a musical history for artists. SongKick also provides alerts, ticket sales, and APIs for other partner websites to display upcoming concert dates on artist pages. Vevo is one of SongKick’s biggest partners. SongKick has raised a total of $7.5 million. [ReadWriteWeb]

Music video streaming service VEVO.com has released a mobile application for the iPhone and iPod Touch [iTunes Link]. Now you can watch high-quality music videos when you are on the go. Best of all, the application is free (currently available in the U.S. and Canada).

According to Ted Mico, the EVP of Interscope/Geffen’s digital division, Lady Gaga’s music videos control about 25% of Vevo’s traffic. Vevo is run by Universal Music, Sony Music, and EMI Music. Vevo received about 35 million unique visitors in January 2009, but the service is not yet profitable. Lady Gaga performed at Vevo’s launch party in New York too. The chances of her having a bad romance (pun intended) with Vevo in the future are very slim seeing these numbers. [CNET]

Now that Vevo has been fully constructed, I have decided to give a quick in depth review of what I think of the service.

Launch:
It seems like the service had a very rough public launching because I have not been able to watch one music video yet. Every one the music videos seem to freeze up at the 78% mark. I tried it on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

Last night when Vevo was supposed to officially launch, there was nothing on the homepage except for the navigation, broke videos, and the search box.

In terms of launching to the public, I give Vevo 1 star out of 5.

Hulu took their launch very seriously. When they launched, the homepage was covered with great featured content and all the videos were working.

Navigation/User Interface:

However I really like how the company set up the navigation, search, and video areas. The navigation is broken down by Videos, Artists, Genres, Channels, and Playlists.

Videos can be sorted by Most Viewed Today/Week/Month/All-Time. The videos can also be sorted by Genre and Time Range. The Genre section shows the most popular videos under Alternative, Blues, Children’s Music, Christian & Gospel, Classical, Comedy/Humor, Country, Easy Listening, Electronic/Dance, Holiday, Jazz, Latino, Other, Pop, R&B/Soul, Rap/Hip-Hop, Reggae, Rock, Soundtrack, Spoken Word, and World. I like the diversity of music video genres.

Channels are hand-picked categories by Vevo staff. Playlists allow the website visitor to play a list of videos consecutively.

Navigation and user interface gets 5 stars out of 5.

Home Page:
Despite the lack of content on the launch night, the Vevo homepage has a Most Popular Today feature. Below that is featured content that scrolls across from various artists. Underneath the featured content is a list of the Top Videos, Top Playlists, and Popular Artists.

There is also a lot of white space surrounding the user interface of the homepage indicating that there is a potential advertising scheme that involves the homepage. Many marketing companies will place a background in that white space for a day and pay top dollar for it.

I give the home page a 4 out of 5 stars. I docked them one point is because it looks very generic. It almost looks like the website based the whole design on Hulu.com.

Overall:
Overall I give Vevo 4 out of 5 stars because I foresee myself using the service very often. On the launch night and today I was very excited to use the service, but it seems very unstable right now. Had this issue been avoided, I would have given Vevo a much more glowing review.

Vevo is geared to launch tomorrow. As many of you know Vevo is going to be the Hulu of music videos. This means that those of you that are sick of MTV playing more reality shows than music videos these days will finally be able to get your fill of music videos again in one central place. Sony, Universal Music Group, and EMI Music have all agreed to place music video clips on Vevo too. YouTube technology will be used to power the video streaming. In order to promote the new service, Vevo has given 50 Cent a baseball bat to bash up some TVs playing his music video. Just in case you don’t get the metaphor in the video, Vevo wants you to stop watching music videos on TV and come to their website instead.

Vevo is an upcoming music video website that will be similar to Hulu. Rio Caraeff is the head of Vevo and the company is rumored to have raised $300 million. The company expects to stream about 450 million videos per month. The company will be ran by about 45 people initially.

Vevo is co-owned by Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Abu Dhabi Media. Vevo will be powered by YouTube’s technology and they will be sharing ad revenue with each other. Vevo will be launching officially on December 8.