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Comment by soneca | Hacker News Reader

All that Vevo ever was for me was a quality seal that guarantees that the video from an artist is official, when searching for a song on YouTube - i.e. it had good image and sound quality and it was indeed a video clip, not just an upload of the song with the album cover or crappy collage as image.

Never thought about it as a company with ambitions to challenge YouTube.

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i actually used to avoid vevo because it would usually give you the censored version of popular songs.

I came to type the same thing.

When you get big, you abandon the edge. That's just how it works.

Vevo posted the official video. Older music videos were made for play on MTV so they were censored and some one else had to edit them. I haven't run across a censored video on Vevo in a while unless I was looking for something old.

For me Vevo meant that the video would probably not play in my country and when it did, I wouldn't be able to play it with mpv and youtube-dl.

Can you clarify what you mean by this? I have never heard of any YouTube video (mp4/webm) having DRM in it.

GeoIP-based blocking, plus some techniques to detect VPN users, end up being fairly (but not 100%) effective at detecting foreign users. There's no need for DRM in the video file if you prevent most people from accessing it in the first place.

Okay, what about this: try youtube-dl on the infinitely-free 600M RAM instance you get in GCE. Upload bandwidth (what you'll use to d/l video from instance) is 1GB/mo max, but outbound to Google services is free, so transfer the videos out through gdrive.

Since when is Vevo a quality seal? I see that mark plastered over 320p videos all the time. I figured it was just the "the ad money is now going to the record company" logo.

That's the way I see it. Vevo means I don't get to see lyrics, I get a video with weird intro/outro patters and instead of just the song, I get the censored and shortened radio version of the song, and I get more ads. If vevo took their content off youtube and ran, I would welcome it. Youtube should be more than MediaMegacorp advertising-disguised-as-music.

If Vevo became the place where music labels and acts -- the ones with the massive money-making audiences -- went to, Vevo would be even less tolerant of bootleg/non-official versions existing on a rival site.

This is why I always add keywords like "lyrics" or "72rpm" to my music searches. Maybe I should just exclude "vevo" though...hmmm...

I thought it's just a brand for YouTube's partnership with record labels.

Yeah, I view it like I do The Orchard and all the other upload/monetization services.

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