Vevo Buys Showyou To Take On YouTube In Subscription Content

Vevo, the world’s largest music video platform, has today announced its first acquisition: Showyou, a subscription-based video streaming platform that helps users find video content that might appeal to them.

Vevo is a joint venture of Universal Music Group, Google, Sony Music Entertainment and Abu Dhabi Media, and offers music videos from major record labels, which are then distributed through YouTube, but the company has been gradually shifting its platform to be more independent.

With the acquisition, Vevo is positioning itself to compete more directly with premium, paid products like YouTube Red and Spotify.

Update: A Showyou spokesperson had this to say:

Remixation is the company that made Showyou. Remixation was founded in 2006 by Mark Hall, along with co-founders Scott Persinger and Spencer Miles. Their first product was Vodpod, which was sold to Lockerz in 2011 so that the team could focus full-time and exclusively on the development of Showyou. The company has been backed by venture capital firm True Ventures throughout its history. Remixation is winding down its affairs as a result of the acquisition of Showyou.

We’ve also learned that seven of ten employees from Showyou are joining Vevo as part of the deal.

Showyou started as a social curation platform, introducing a subscription-based model last year. The latter could be used by Vevo in two ways: to complement whatever revenues it makes through ads, and to help it ween itself off the YouTube platform.

In November, Vevo introduced a new mobile app that focuses more heavily on video personalization and curation for the user.

This comes in the wake of a growing interest in personalization from streaming companies like Spotify, which has introduced features such as Discover Weekly to help users find new artists and content based on their behavior.

Showyou, on the other hand, launched back in 2011 to deliver curated short-form video, and last year the company introduced a subscription model, letting users pay for channels on a month-by-month or yearly basis. Showyou offers a wide selection of video from content providers like NASATV, the AP, Reddit TV, VICE Media, ABCNews, among many more. Content creators have had the ability to determine the pricing for their own channels.

Vevo currently sees more than 12 billion monthly views globally, with a library of 150,000 HD music videos.