In May ’07 last.fm integrated video clips. The video hype was little because there were hardly any clips and soon the Last.fm centered around the acquisition by CBS and the absence from the Day of Silence project.
Even today there is little video content: a quick search for the [UK] iTunes Top 10 Songs and Top 10 Albums only returned 3 video clips (The Chemical Brothers, My Chemical Romance with an older clip and MIKA with a remix track).
But Last.fm might be on to something and could become the new MTV, the MTV2.0 with a personalized video clip streams. But much improvement needs to be made to the actual offer.
- More video content.
- Integrate video in to the last.fm client and a pop-out video player to the website.
With the growing amount of wide screen monitors, video can become really popular when the user can watch the clips next to the browser window. A resizable video player lets the user watch video clips on every free real estate area, without having to lose focus on the open window. If you only have 800*640 monitor width, it’s time to upgrade. ;-). - Allow only high quality videos: who can be bothered to watch clips if a 300*200px large video is pixelated? Full screen view shouldn’t be considered as long as low quality clips are offered.
- Make videos embeddable.
- Videos must be scrobbled. Last.fm is all about scrobbling, building your profile and getting targeted radio, recommendations.
Once all this implemented, I can perfectly imagine a new music revolution and many users watching non-stop video clips instead of only listening to last.fm radio.
A good start would be to offer every new video clip. Only remaining question is if the user base will wait until there is enough of video content.
Update: Last.fm videoclips are now scrollable and embeddable.
Originally posted on July 18, 2007 @ 4:38 pm