Next to each video listing, there is a (somewhat conspicuous) downward arrow button that, when clicked, brings up options for buying the song on iTunes or Amazon. Unlike other sites, though, PluggedIn offers direct links to where you can buy the music if you're interested in doing so.
There's no way to embed a video on your own blog, for example, or even e-mail it to a friend through the web page. The button that indicates it will give you ways to share the video doesn't actually allow you to do anything but copy a link to the video on PluggedIn's site. Something that also differs from other video sites is PluggedIn's sharing options. For those of us who don't like our web pages to screw with our browser windows, this behavior is quite obnoxious (other sites, like YouTube, don't do this when you use fullscreen mode). Full-screen mode here is somewhat annoying, though, as it really just means "we're about to resize your browser window to max, as well as the video." When you click the full-screen button again to go back to "regular" mode, your web browser remains maximized. The music video controls are about what you would expect: you can play/pause a video, skip ahead or back, adjust volume, and watch in full-screen mode. PluggedIn promises that more content will be added as licensing deals are worked out and videos are added to the catalog-as it turns out, Sony BMG's videos are still being cranked through by PluggedIn's servers, according to a post made to the PluggedIn blog, so many of those artists (Alicia Keys, Dave Matthews, Foo Fighters, etc.) don't have videos up yet.
We were able to find music videos for many of the popular artists we searched for, although there were a few holes here and there-Britney Spears fans, for example, need not apply. Still, even the "worst" quality videos at PluggedIn are indeed better than what we would find at YouTube. Many of PluggedIn's "featured" videos on the main page don't rate as high as this random No Doubt video There appears to be a little HD meter at the bottom of each music video alongside the other controls that tells you exactly how good (or bad) the quality of each video is. Normally, this wouldn't bother me (I don't consider myself to be an HD snob, especially not online), but for a service that boasts about its HD content, such a feature would seem important. Unfortunately, not all videos are available in HD-in fact, they all vary in quality, and there seems to be no easy-to-use way to search or sort videos by video quality.
After that, the site functions mostly like any other video sharing site you've ever used-because of this, it's relatively simple to navigate and easy to learn how to get around and watch videos. This plug-in is available for IE, Firefox, and Safari.
Test driveįirst, users must install a Movie Media Player plug-in that PluggedIn claims offers better quality video and other benefits, like full-screen viewing. We took a spin around the site to see how it compares to other video sites on the 'Net, and whether it lives up to its promises. There are also videos available from a number of independent labels, and videos range from "broadcast quality" all the way up to HD. The fourth, Warner Music, is apparently sitting this round out for now, although PluggedIn says that it has managed to obtain rights to a handful of Warner's videos for the time being. PluggedIn Media has begun testing its high-quality music video site this morning, in hopes that both viewers and advertisers will be attracted to the professionally-produced content.Īt launch, features 10,000 music videos licensed from three of the Big Four music labels: Universal, EMI, and Sony BMG. Why not? They're free! Unfortunately, there aren't any well-known places online to get high-quality videos without paying for them, but at least one company believes that's a market niche needing to be filled. Instead, we log on to the Internet to dig up tolerable-quality videos uploaded to YouTube or Google Video. When most of us want to watch a music video, we no longer think of flipping on MTV or VH1 in hopes of catching our favorite artists.