Vidzone

Yesterday the Vidzone service launched on PS3. It’s a competent music video service but it could definitely do with some improvement. I'm not going to completely shit on Vidzone as I'm sure it will improve over time and refine things but I'm just going to outline a few things that disappointed me with my first use.

First off, the time it takes to start up the application is too long and moves the service from being a way to just quickly watch videos to an arduous process waiting for the service to load and finding the videos you want to watch.

The UI as it stands now is not great and makes navigation difficult and too time consuming. It’s visually nice to look at and appealing but the functionality isn't great. The search takes too long to use and the keyboard system is terrible, it would have been better to use the PS3 keyboard to enter information. Simple things like a “more from this artist” option or a better recommendation system would make it more fun to use and more useful.

All of the videos play in 4:3 so even if the video was filmed in widescreen it will play in a letterbox within the 4:3 box so sometimes you can be left with a video playing in the middle of your screen with huge amounts of unused space surrounding it. The quality of the videos aren't mind-blowing either but when you consider the fact that all of these videos have to be instantly streamable it makes sense. It would be nice to have some sort of HD stream option though if your internet connection can handle it. It kind of reduces the need to use the service altogether if the videos don't look great in fullscreen mode.

The homepage when you first open Vidzone is where I see the most potential and exciting features. I like the idea of new playlists and features showing up on the homepage whenever you open it. For instance there is a a playlist for Kasabian’s hits on the front page and one for music from the 80’s. If they keep doing things like this and update it regularly to make it more like an on demand music channel I will probably visit often to see what's new and leave it playing in the background.

Apart from that there’s nothing that would make me want to chose Vidzone over watching music videos on YouTube using the built in internet browser especially when the videos are around the same quality and it’s arguably faster to not Vidzone. That said, I look forward to seeing how the service can evolve and improve over time.