A subscription video service ala YouTube Red may be on its way to video streaming service Vevo. The service has acquired Showyou, a short-form video aggregation startup which began offering subscriptions for publishers’ content last year. In a nutshell, it serves up a stream of video shorts from content providers like Vice and Funny or Die, according to Bloomberg.
The acquisition is part of Vevo CEO Erik Huggers’ quest to position itself as a prominent stand-alone video streamer. Vevo currently relies heavily on syndication through YouTube, a minority shareholder, and other video streamers for revenue.
“With the acquisition of Showyou we take a significant step forward in re-positioning Vevo as a best-in-class product-driven organization,” said Huggers in a statement. “Showyou allows us to accelerate our pace of innovation with the ability to rapidly add new and differentiated features as we iterate our products in 2016 and beyond.”
Launched in 2011, Showyou was featured multiple times in Apple’s best-of app lists. The service began a pilot subscription effort last year with channels from Above Average and IndieFlix. It spent the past year expanding and “had just launched a wave of new tools this past July when we began talking to [Vevo’s] Erik Huggers,” according to Showyou founder and president Mark Hall in a blog post.
Vevo will acquire the start-up for its “technologies,” according to Bloomberg. Seven out of nine employees, including Hall, will join Vevo’s team. “Showyou’s capabilities, combined with the breadth and scale of the Vevo platform, will enable us to create an exciting new class of products that should delight both music fans and artists,” explained Hall in a statement.
Vevo, founded in 2009 primarily to distribute music videos for Universal Music and Sony Music, reports a massive 12 billion monthly views of its music video and entertainment programming. The streamer introduced an iPhone app last month and plans to launch apps for other operating systems going forward.
