(cc) by shankar, shiv/flickr

Universal and YouTube have announced the creation of a joint music video site, apparently called 'Vevo'. After the Google subsidiary's recent trouble with music collection body PRS and their announcement that they're losing money fast this comes against an interesting backdrop.

What isn't entirely clear is what either of the parties gets out of the deal.

Universal claims that the site will have more traffic at launch than any other music site. But it isn't clear why they think this is so. If they launched a premium channel on YouTube itself, they'd certainly be able to leverage that site's enormous userbase - but how do they expect to make use of it if they go it alone, even with YouTube's backing and technology, on a different URL? Why would someone choose to go to a new site that after all only carries one label's tunes, rather than YouTube where they expect to find all of them? The recent troubles isn't an answer - it will surely just lead to user frustration, I'd have thought, rather than making music vid fans think 'What other YouTube partnered property can I go to to access the videos I want?'.

Furthermore, YouTube's big idea was to offer open streaming to any video creators, compromising on quality that would have made their bandwidth bill even more whopping than it already is. So it's far from the ideal technology for Universal to use, when there are much better, higher quality and bandwidth platforms they could make use of for a small price. The compromise with YouTube was quality versus universality (if you'll excuse the pun), and since Universal needs make no such compromise you'd expect they'd fork out a small amount to have the videos shown as their no-doubt-expensive directors would have wanted them to be seen.

And what does YouTube get from the deal? Fragmenting their user-base and brand? Perhaps they're hoping to placate the music labels - until recently an ally, but now a sparring partner.

Perhaps the two giants have something up their sleeve - until then, we'll see!