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UPDATED: VEVO’s Online, But…

image from www.google.com (UPDATE 4) I got up at 5AM EST to check out Universal and Sony's new music video mega-site VEVO and write about it, but…

While the design and interface is sleek, and it features the requisite channels, social networking and saveable video playlists, for now at least, it's plagued by painfully slow loads and time outs.

It's a disappointing launch for a high profile launch backed by the two largest label groups, tens of millions of dollars from Abu Dhabi and tech from Google and YouTube.  As of a 3AM tweet, they are working on it:

launch overload!

The @VEVO team is working on it… stand by

8 AM: Still problems. Even new user sign up times out, for example. Things are getting a bit better, but its early morning in the East; so most users are just getting up. No Twitter updates for 5 hours on all the problems. Overall, not good.

10:25 AM: Load problems persist. New user sign-up still times out No update from the VEVO team.

12:45: This tweet from VEVO just came across:

"The
traffic to VEVO.com has exceeded our expectations by several orders of
magnitude! Bear with us as we try to smooth everything out."

4:45PM: It seems to be getting a little better, but problems persist.

Stay tuned…Or try for yourself and let us know what you think.

More background on VEVO.

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20 Comments

  1. I’ve been waiting for this for a while – it’s hulu for music but with hulu having just launched their own music video solution and with an existing viewership, I wonder if this will catch on. I still prefer the subscription model of Spotify but I’m looking forward to seeing what Vevo does with this. It’s interesting but it’s buggy – you’d think with the money dropped there it would be a more robust distributed network but in its beginnings hulu was pretty slow too.

  2. Well, once again anyone living out of the USA gets nothing. We always get, “…..is not yet available in your country”. I’m a Canadian living in Japan for now. You think if you want to connect with the world, you’d do your best to get past the international restrictions.
    So when I realize it’s not available here, I also realize it’s not that big or important yet.

  3. Kelly, Here is what I’ve been told via an email from Sony:
    “VEVO will initially launch in the US and Canada so ex-North America YouTube channels will remain intact for all artists. Consumers accessing our videos from outside the US will be sent to YouTube branded pages until some time next year when VEVO will expand internationally. We will continue to manage UGC (user generated content) channels for each artist on YouTube proper.”

  4. Buggy isn’t the word – it plain doesn’t work. I tried searching “Ry Cooder” and after 5 minutes of spinning, the connection dropped.
    I find it very hard to believe that Vevo is being slammed with so much traffic that it isn’t working. Honestly, who really knows about this service other than people in the industry? It’s not like the world was waiting for it.
    Clearly, there’s some code broken somewhere. FAIL.

  5. It worked well for a bit this morning (found a bunch of Living Colur videoa I didn’t know they made) but I just tried loading the page and 10 minutes later is is still “loading…”

  6. Brilliant!!! Nice one Doug another great fuck-up – this is what you get with $300 million and 2 major labels a site that doesn’t work on launch day! There are NO EXCUSES here.
    IF this was an independent venture everyone would pull out, overthinking the wheel yet again, Doug this has rank a the top of your list of total screw ups.
    At least the artists (participating ones) didn’t have to wait that long to get fucked over yet again.

  7. you can’t blame this on Doug Morris, he’s probably been drinking warm milk and playing with his grandkids the whole time it was being developed. Now Rio Caraeff, on the other hand, is probably chomping Xanax like Tic-Tacs.

  8. i expected a lot more. corporate cold interface. clunky, sterile and lame…this is the best they can do?

  9. Wow! Just got a big fat FAIL trying to load VEVO. “Execution permission cannot be acquired.” How was there not a soft launch of this? How can $300 million be so poorly allocated to allow this to happen? I truly think VEVO will be a good platform, but this first impression is not going well.

  10. The launch event last night was like watching the record business die in real-time. A LONG string of 60 year-old white men patting themselves on the back for their amazing breakthrough. Doug Morris is completely to blame. He was the driving force behind the old-school music industry launch plan. It was suicide to set a date and stick to it regardless of whether the site was ready or not and throw a huge “media event” hyping the launch. So old school! There were many involved that said “hey, maybe we should hype it AFTER it goes through a public beta and all the bugs are worked out instead” but the senior citizens running the show wouldn’t hear of it. Anyone with a brain that was involved saw this coming months ago.

  11. while i think it’s too early to lay blame at any one person’s feet, I agree with 100% of the rest of your post.

  12. I agree with all of the above posts. This launch seems more rushed then the launch of windows vista. I see no “breakthrough” or “MTV is dead”. The only thing Vevo seems to do (and not very well at that) is just basically did what youtube did.. stream music videos. Vevo has just made it so the record labels are in control of the music videos instead of the individual user uploading a video to youtube. Sure these videos might get a lot of plays.. but the general idea of the website does not seem “groundbreaking” to me. I mean even Last.fm does more then Vevo, and Vevo had a massive budget with some of the best technology behind it. I thought Vevo was going to have some awesome new features as far as social networking goes.. I was disappointed.

  13. haha really you think only industry people know about vevo and hypebot…this just shows how much you know about anything really….

  14. Vevo must not have set up their DNS properly. Apparently that’s too much to ask. Try placing “www.” infront of vevo.com and it should work. Same thing happened to me.

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