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Vevo generates a staggering 17 billion video views a month.
That kind of audience should make the music video site one of the buzziest properties on the Web — and certainly one of the most valuable. But its complicated ownership structure and its intimate ties to Google and YouTube make it a knotty business to get your head around.
It’s also hard to manage, but that’s what Erik Huggers, its newish CEO, is trying to do. At Code/Media last week, Huggers talked about his strategy to turn Vevo from a promising notion into a real, standalone company — including a plan for a subscription service. (Sony Entertainment boss Michael Lynton, who oversees Vevo partner/investor Sony Music, later said that means some videos will no longer be available for free.)
That’s a challenge, but Huggers likes challenges — even when they don’t pan out, like his attempt to launch a Web TV subscription service at Intel.
We spent some time going over that project as well. Huggers thinks his attempt was a couple years early, which is a reasonable argument, given that three years later, only one Web TV service has any kind of traction. Here’s the full video of our chat:
And here’s the audio version:
(For more audio from Code/Media 2016 and all our other events, subscribe to Re/code Replay on iTunes.)
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
