The company wants to eventually take Vevo TV to cable distributors to compete heads-on with MTV, according to an Adweek report, and it is also thinking about launching genre-specific live streams. Think Vevo Hip Hop, for example. But ultimately, going live is all about devices and the way they’re changing how we watch TV.

Vevo has put a lot of work into apps for mobile and connected devices, which it built in-house with the help of a small team of San Francisco-based developers. Mobile was a big success for the company early on, and the launch of the Xbox app a year ago “turned out to be wildly successful,” as Vevo’s product and tech SVP Michael Cerda put it when we talked about the subject a few months ago.

Vevo followed up with a Roku app in December, and Cerda told me that he wants to tackle additional connected TV platforms as soon as possible. “There is a huge opportunity for us there,” Cerda said.

Continuous playback combined with curation makes a whole lot of sense for something like music videos on connected TVs. Users don’t want to pick up their remote control to pick and choose every single video, but instead want something up and running in the background without interruption. And if a viewer is ever bored by what’s playing on Vevo TV’s live stream, then there’s always tons of on-demand content available right within the same app. It’s the best of both worlds.

So how do Vevo’s cable plans fit into this? Cable obviously has a much wider reach than a device like Roku, but the real lure are cable-sized ad-budgets. One could argue that Vevo might compete with itself if the same programming is available on cable set-top boxes and connected devices. But ultimately, those set-top-boxes are changing, and the distinctions between streaming and cable distribution are going to become less and less visible to consumers (to hear more about the future of TV, check out our paidContent conference in New York next month).

In that world, a live TV channel – distributed on as many platforms as possible – will guarantee that consumers will always access to Vevo, no matter whether they’re streaming or viewing plain old TV. And that’s a smart move.

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Vevo’s previous video watch page offered a list of related clips in a sidebar, a playlist at the bottom and a lot of other information sprinkled across the page. The new page does away with most of that, and instead offloads artist information to a new page that opens as an overlay (or modal box, as web designers like to call it). It’s much cleaner, with a bigger focus on what really matters to Vevo: the play button. Pandora, said Cerda, has been a great inspiration for this kind of simplicity.

Vevo’s new video watch pages do away with a lot of clutter.

Cerda isn’t afraid to point to these kinds of inspirations. As a matter of fact, they’re the reason that he left Vevo’s New York office to build out a product team in San Francisco. He wanted to be closer to the startup scene, and that simply wasn’t possible with a glitzy music industry office in Times Square. “The ecosystem was restricted to just that floor,” he said.

In San Francisco, inspiration is everywhere, and things are decidedly more low-key. Cerda’s team of seven initially worked out of his garage, and moved into a small downtown office just a few weeks ago. Tables were still being assembled when I stopped by earlier this month, and everything looked more like a small startup than a major label-backed music platform.

A lot of contextual information is now presented through a new artist modal.

One computer in the space was dedicated to a permanent Google+ Hangout with the New York office, where Vevo’s iOS developers are working on the next steps in mobile. In San Francisco, the team is working on improving the Android experience, and getting ready to take on the living room next.

Vevo rolled out its Xbox app this spring, and Cerda told me that it “turned out to be wildly successful.” That’s why he wants to take Vevo to other connected TV platforms as soon as possible. “There is a huge opportunity for us there,” he told me.

Cerda’s previous stints include being the CEO and cofounder of VOIP startup Ooma and a VP of messaging technologies gig at Myspace. The biggest lesson he learned in those years was “not to overbuild product,” he said, but instead to take small steps and continuously improve things. Vevo used to roll out new product builds every two months or so. Cerda switched to a weekly schedule. “I like to develop and release early and often,” he told me, explaining that he started to involve the whole company in testing these product iterations before they roll out to Vevo’s user base. Said Cerda: “I’ve made the company my extended QA team.”

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