Who’d have thought that years after MTV went out of vogue and post-YouTube, a number of sites would still be battling it out to dominate the music video space online. That’s because online video is said to be the fastest growing market for advertising globally and music videos are potentially a big part of that story.
Perhaps then it’s not just co-incidence that on the day that US-based Vevo crosses the pond, Muzu.TV has announced a partnership with Metacafe, which will see it bed down in Europe and hopefully consolidate its dominance locally.
I say Europe because, even though Metacafe itself it US-based, the new content deal with Muzu.TV focuses primarily on users in Europe, such is the limitation of Muzu.TV’s licensing deals with all four major labels. That said, its catalogue of 85,000 videos dwarfs music industry-backed Vevo (presuming you can access it), allowing the London and Ireland-based company to make the claim to be the largest legal catalogue of online music videos in the world.
Thus, as of today, Metacafe’s 10 million unique monthly users in Europe now have access and in addition to video content from all four major record labels, key independents and exclusive live footage (in the form of Muzu.TV’s “Live and Loud” sessions) and behind the scenes videos, are also being made available. Outside of Europe, however, including the US, Metacafe users are limited to Muzu.TV’s independent catalogue. It seems the world isn’t flat after all.