Vidzone launched in early June throughout a few European countries to great success, and it didn’t take long for the App to hit the 1,000,000 downloads milestone. More recently Vidzone is becoming a key way for artists to launch their new singles, videos and albums with Kasabian, Placebo, U2 and The Prodigy choosing Vidzone to premiere their new music vids. Further signs of Vidzone going from strength to strength is the news that Vidzone will be launching in eleven more countries throughout the region, Vidzone truly is an ‘app’ that SCEE can truly be proud of – it’s even appearing in the ‘Games Are Just The Start’ TV ads.
Obviously there is no such thing as a free lunch and the product needs to generate some revenues somewhere along the way, so it came as no surprise that in August Vidzone started showing ads, and unfortunately for Vidzone that is where the problems started. Since then many users have complained that those ads are showing before every single video which makes Vidzone kind of pointless because if you watch one of the many music channels you only see ads about every 15-20 minutes. Over Twitter Vidzone has promised that it is a bug which is causing this inconvenience and they are working hard to get to to the bottom of this – for some this appears to have gone on for far too long so the moans are getting louder.
A short time ago, Vidzone tweeted “Quick Questions: Who would pay for a premium service of VidZone? (i.e. no adverts better quality videos etc)” This throws the door open to many questions, will it work like Spotify ie. Having a free ad supported version and a premium version with no ads? Are they having problems isolating the ‘bug’ which is causing ads to show before every single track? Will this effect the growth and expansion of Vidzone as a platform? Would anyone pay for a music video service when music TV is widely available free of charge?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below, and we’ll be sure to point the Vidzone guys here – Oh and be nice as they seem a really nice bunch, especially as they are just floating the idea to gather responses.