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Vevo Brings ‘Call Me Maybe’ (And 50,000 Other Music Videos) To The Mobile Web

Anthony Ha

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Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and random startups. Previously, he worked as a staff tech writer at Adweek, a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing.... → Learn More

Friday, July 6th, 2012
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If you get a sudden hankering to watch Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” (who hasn’t?), and the only device handy is your iPhone, starting today there’s even less standing between you and instant gratification.

Vevo (the joint venture music video site from Sony Music, Universal Music, and Abu Dhabi Media) already has a strong mobile presence, with apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry Playbook. Previously, however if you visited the site on your mobile device, you wouldn’t have been able to watch videos — instead, it directed you to download one of the apps. Now, thanks to the launch of Vevo’s new mobile Web experience, you can watch directly form your mobile browser, no downloads required. (You can also watch a bunch of music videos, including “Call Me Maybe”, via YouTube’s mobile apps and mobile website, but with Vevo you get a music-focused experience and access to a library of 50,000 videos.)

I checked out the mobile website on both my iPhone and my iPad, and it worked fine. The browsing and searching experience are pretty straightforward, and the videos played smoothly over my home WiFi.

Beyond being a general sign of the increasing importance of the mobile web, this could be important for Vevo as more and more social sharing moves online. As the company notes in its blog post, when someone sees a link to a Vevo video on the mobile version of Facebook or Twitter, they can now tap on the link and the mobile website should start playing the video within seconds.


Crunchbase

Company: Vevo
Website: vevo.com
Launch Date: December 8, 2009

VEVO is the world’s leading all-premium music video and entertainment platform. VEVO is available in the United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Spain and United Kingdom through VEVO.com, the mobile web, Mobile and Tablet Apps (iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry Playbook), Connected Television (Xbox, Roku, Boxee) and user embeddable video players. VEVO TV, an always-on broadcast-style music and video channel, is also available in the US and Canada within VEVO.com and apps for iOS,...

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