VEVO is the go-to-place for music videos, with over 45,000 videos from more than 11,000 artists, its a great service. The VEVO brand may be familiar to you due to its partnership with YouTube. Today VEVO expanded their line-up of supported platforms with a new VEVO app on the Xbox 360.
After installing the free app, users are asked to signup for a VEVO account at http://vevo.com/xbox and enter a unique code to associate their Xbox with their account. After a fairly painless process, users can then begin to navigate the Kinect-enabled app. While this may not seem like one of those ‘of course’ moments, it is an important feature as many other entertainment apps do not support Kinect.
The app heavily integrates and leverages your social connections. Not only can you watch what your friends are watching, you can share tracks and create playlists to show off your individual tastes. Music can be searched or browsed by artist, what’s hot, or even friend activity.
One of the best features is the ability to simply play an artist’s videos, this combined with playlists means you can now fulfil that dream (in your living room) of being a VJ at your next party. There is also a ‘Shows’ area that gives you access to video from events like the Grammys.
The app uses Microsoft’s smooth streaming technology to get the music started straight away, with quality scaling up to 1080 if your connection can handle it.
As Xbox continues its march to transform the Xbox from a gaming device to an entertainment hub, music videos are key to their strategy. Competitor PlayStation 3 has had VidZone since 2009, although for a long time was only SD and is overrun with ads.
The VEVO app on Xbox 360 is rolling out to Gold Subscribers in Australia and New Zealand today. VEVO is also available via the web, iOS, Android, Windows Phone.
For more information, check out http://www.xbox.com/en-au.