The idea behind ShufflerTV, which is set to officially launch Wednesday, is pretty simple: The site aggregates videos posted on music blogs and online music magazines like Pitchfork, XLR8R, Urb.com and the Fader, and compiles them to individual stations. The result are continuous streams of music videos that have been curated by people who actually know what they’re talking about.

Shuffler.fm combines this with a really neat player that allows users to skip songs, check out what’s coming next, change stations, subscribe to specific stations to easily access them and share individual videos on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

ShufflerTV integrates with Shuffler.fm’s audio site, which has been doing this kind of curated music programming sans video for some time. Users can for example subscribe to a station like Urb.com on ShufflerTV, and then listen to the songs posted there as part of their personal RadioMagazine, which is kind of like a megamix of all the songs of their favorite audio and video surces.

Shuffler isn’t the only one looking to offer a new take on music television online. Major label joint venture Vevo launched its own continuously playing music video station dubbed Vevo TV in March. However, Vevo is currently very much a take on the traditional MTV model, with a one-size-fits-all approach towards curation. ShufflerTV on the other hand comes with a much more targeted approach. Both has its merits. But if you ask me, Shuffler simply sounds better.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content
• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Connected Consumer Q1: The Over-the-Top vs. Pay TV Battle Heats Up

Vevo is by far the biggest video publisher on YouTube. Recent comScore numbers show that Vevo clocked close to 565 million video views and more than 50 million unique viewers on the site in December alone. There are few other publishers on YouTube who come close to those view counts, and no one else engages so many people. Check out the chart below for details:

Vevo’s deal with YouTube was up. Vevo had been distributing its videos on YouTube ever since its launch at the end of 2009, but its deal with the Google-owned video site ended in December, and there had been persistent rumors that Facebook had shown interest in stealing Vevo away from YouTube. With a new deal, Google can deepen its ties with Vevo, ensuring that it will be able to show major label-owned videos for years to come.

Mobile and TV is getting bigger. This one is a bit of a long-shot, but worth considering nonetheless. More and more music videos are consumed on mobile and connected devices, be it phones, iPads or Xboxes. Vevo recognizes this, and has put lots of work into some pretty slick mobile and connected apps. The problem for YouTube is that it isn’t seeing any of the money from those mobile plays: Vevo is delivering and monetizing videos to mobile and connected devices on its own. It’s unclear whether this new deal would immediately change anything about this, but it’s possible that YouTube wants to get a foot in the door to eventually get a piece of this cake as well.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

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.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Players and Strategies for Real-Time In-Stream Advertising
• Report: Monetizing Digital Content
• How consumer media will change in 2013

The agreement with the biggest music label, brokered by the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) and announced Tuesday, enables indie songwriters and music publishers to collect royalties from Vevo for the first time.

Also read: Vevo viewers down 20% year-to-year

Founded in December 2009, Vevo has grown at an incendiary pace, establishing itself as dominant supplier of video programming for Google’s YouTube platform and taking in around  $150 million in revenue last year, mostly from ad sales.

That money had previously gone to the parent-company labels, who had in earlier contracts with artists defined music videos as merely promotional tools, not revenue-generating assets.

“This is a model example of how record labels along with songwriters and music publishers can move forward together to ensure that the licensing process is more effective and efficient, and that all creators are fairly compensated,” said David Israelite, president and CEO of the NMPA, in a statement.

Updated:

Participating NMPA publishers will give the rights necessary for the synchronization of their music to a video. In exchange, they’ll receive royalties from the video based on a percentage of Universal Music’s receipts.

Citing unnamed individuals close to the deal, Billboard reports that the agreement calls for publishers to receive 15 percent of ad revenues generated by their videos. The deal is also retroactive back to 2008.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• OTT technologies and strategies for broadcasters
• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG

Music video platform Vevo, which had been one of the fastest growing video properties on the Internet, is witnessing a steep viewership drop, at least on the web.

According to numbers released Monday by Internet usage tracker comScore, Vevo’s unique viewers in the U.S. during May dropped 20 percent from the same period last year, from 60.4 million to around 48.3 million.

Meanwhile, the average number of minutes each viewer spent watching Vevo videos in May declined 26 percent over the same period, from 105.1 to 77.7.

The online music platform, jointly launched in December 2009 by Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Abu Dhabi Media, had been on a meteoric rise, with unique viewers growing 44 percent from June 2010 to June 2011.

So what’s going on?

Also read: What a Facebook deal with Vevo could unleash

A Vevo spokesperson told paidContent Monday that the comScore metrics don’t offer a complete picture of a content business that has migrated to some degree from a core YouTube channel to mobile platforms, areas that not included in the research group’s measurement.

Vevo claims “active” users of its mobile apps have increased 46 percent year over year, with mobile streams up 434 percent over that period, reaching 450 million worldwide in May.

Added: Vevo additionally notes that a methodology change enacted by comScore in July 2011 renders our May 2011 – May 2012 comparison of minutes spent by user moot. In fact, minutes spent by user per month watching Vevo content have actually risen since the methodology change. 

Vevo also attributes some of the discrepancy to Google’s redesign of YouTube, which has moved away from feeds of most popular videos to a channel/subscriber model.

The comScore metrics also don’t reflect performance in other territories where Vevo operates, such as Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand.

Note: This story was updated to include Vevo’s response.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• The state of cross-platform media measurement
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

Many of the titles are live concert films recorded over the last 30 years, and some of the artists appearing in these concerts include Queen, Isaac Hayes, Alice Cooper, Jethro Tull, Ike & Tina Turner, Sinead O’Connor, Ray Charles, Deep Purple, the Wu Tang Clan, Tori Amos, ZZ Top and Korn. Other artists, including The Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Jay-Z, Elton John, Nirvana, Alicia Keys, appear in music documentaries.

Netflix hasn’t made any announcement about this new wave of music content, but a company spokesperson sent me the following statement vie email:

“At Netflix we aim to provide great things to watch in many categories for our broad audience, the recent addition of concerts and documentaries is an example of that.”

As vague as that statement is, it seems to shed a little light on the direction that music content could play in Netflix’s future: It’s unlikely that Netflix would launch a major initiative to compete with Vevo or any other music video site, or even one of the many sites specializing in live music recordings.

However, Netflix has steadily been building out powerful niche content for a variety of audiences. The site has seen a huge influx of Korean dramas in recent months, for example, and it has also taken on a large catalog of Anime content — two very distinct categories with very passionate fan bases.

Classic rock and pop music concerts could eventually become another of those powerful niches: not big enough of a deal to get millions of new customers to sign up for Netflix, but important enough to a subset of its audience to keep them subscribed even after they’ve burned through all episodes of popular TV shows like Mad Men.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Q4 Wrap-up: SOPA and the future of digital content

“This year we’re hoping to launch in at least another six countries,” Caraeff said. “Our big priority is to make the service more available in more countries.”

Vevo, which redesigned last week, is currently available in the U.S., Canada and UK. paidContent understands Australia is one of the new territories under consideration.

In January, reports had it that Vevo, which supplies officially-licensed music videos to YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG), was in preliminary talks to switch that supply to Facebook, which lacks such a content play of its own.

Asked to confirm talks, Caraeff told me:

“We’re in a good position. Content is king. We’re seeing a lot of distribution partners take an interest in that content as a way to differentiate their services.

“We’ve had a lot of people reach out and say, ‘What more can we do together beyond just having the player on our platform?’ We’re talking with everyone about a more in-depth relationship; we’ve nothing to announce.”

in other words, Vevo is, of course, speaking with a lot of potential partners. Vevo recently began supplying some content to AOL (NYSE: AOL) and Yahoo.

The service is clocking up 3.5 billion views per month, Caraeff said – 30 percent of its streams come via YouTube (10 percent in the UK).

“Mobile and tablet is the fastest-growing part of our platform,” he said. “Xbox is exceeding our expectations.”

Many online content distributors, and many in the music segment, are currently on a globalisation drive, as they each try to achieve worldwide scale as global brands.

Caraeff said it’s important for Vevo to diversify revenue streams from just ad-supported music videos. Original programming o

Vevo did $150 million in revenue last year and has paid $100 million in royalties in the last two years, Caraeff also said during a session at The Guardian’s Changing Media Summit

“Advertising is a great model when you’re trying to reach billions of people – it’s not the only model.

“We’re very much focused on profitability but it’s not our number-one objective. We’re very much on track – it’s something we hope to achieve in the next year We’re definitely not a perpetual loss-making business.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How social discovery is transforming entertainment
• Welcome to the New Paradigm: TV Makers Rule
• Got a Cable Subscription? There’ll Be an App for That

According to product manager Austin Haugen, since opening up the Timeline platform this January over 3,000 Timeline apps have been launched, and their implementation has generated huge growth for brands. Two examples that Haugen gave were Pinterest (whose daily active user base has grown by 60 percent since launching its Timeline app) and Goodreads (which has increased daily traffic by 77 percent).

App makers were frequently asked by event attendees “What’s your verb?” — referring to the word defining the app’s updates on Facebook, from “Watch” to “Read” to “Listen,” that group the updates according to category. For apps like the fashion-focused Pose or epicurist Foodspotting, updates link users back to the original sites for in-depth details about the food or fashion being shared.

The potential for Timeline apps is just being discovered by many of the brands. For example, Fandango’s current implementation just allows users to share their movie-watching decisions, but representatives said that future iterations could include the ability to coordinate film-going with friends.

The Onion‘s Timeline app, just launched yesterday, updates the user’s profile with the articles they’ve read and videos they’ve watched, and also now includes The Onion’s “Our Dumb Readers” feature. “Our Dumb Readers” feature highlights what content individual friends are consuming at the top of the site, and also allows users to curate the Onion home page to show just the stories and videos being consumed by their friends.

But while the name of the Timeline app game might be sharing, many of the apps, including Fandango and Vevo, also enable users to turn off the sharing function, which will be important for those users who perhaps don’t want to broadcast how many times they’ve watched the same Taylor Swift video.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• How social discovery is transforming entertainment
• The quantified self: hacking the body for better health

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• A near-term outlook for big data
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012