MeeMix Remixes YouTube To Create Personalized Music Video Channels

MeeMix keeps plugging along on its journey to attract more users to its personalized Internet radio service. Today the company is adding a new feature which complements users’ radio stations with “twin” music video channels.

While Last.fm introduced video recommendations exactly a year ago, MeeMix thinks this will help make its service more attractive. The company has always felt its taste prediction technology is not strictly limited to audio, so from its perspective offering taste predictions for video is somewhat of a logical next step.

Enabling MeeMix’s video mode requires no setup at all. The feature leans on the taste selections existing users have already made when setting up their existing radio stations (i.e., music genres, artists and songs). Relevant music videos are then fetched from YouTube. Editing radio stations, for example adding a new artist, impacts the video selection immediately.

MeeMix fetches a wide range of videos—from official music videos, to very amateur material. Some users will find this quite entertaining. I for example had to stop writing this post mid-way to enjoy a vintage video of John Coltrane playing Naima.

The video sound quality falls below the audio stations’ 128 Kbps and that MeeMix cannot perform volume leveling on the YouTube videos.

MeeMix is trying to keep users engaged while circumventing licensing issues, royalty fees, and bandwidth costs. Since all the videos are streamed from YouTube, it is Google’s problem if any copyright issues arise. (This is a similar approach taken by music search engine Songza, which streams the audio from YouTube videos to create music playlists).

Will the video channels help MeeMix attract more users, or is it too much a a MeeToo service?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 8:47 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.