Vevo's New Music Video GIF Maker is Good, But Needs Work

vevo gif music videos news drake 1 — Image used with permission by copyright holder

It just got easier to put your favorite artists in the loop, or at least into a loop, in one of their most creative forms: music videos. Vevo, a streaming service that has one of the largest collections of music videos, has released its first-ever GIF maker feature, allowing you to make shareable video loops out of the hundreds of thousands of music videos in its library.

Now when you click on a video on Vevo’s website, you’ll notice that under the video is a GIF button, which when clicked takes you to the GIF editing page. Once there you can scroll the time mark until you pick which five second part of the video you want to make into a GIF. You can add a caption under the video and share it on Twitter and Facebook after it’s done being processed. In less than 40 seconds Beyonce’s elegant bat rampage from her video Hold Up can be on repeat for Twitter’s enjoyment.

The GIF maker feature is still in beta, so there are still a few things left to be desired. The feature can only be accessed via the Vevo site on your computer, a particularly odd choice given the fact that Vevo unveiled a new Portrait Mode video player for the mobile app as part of its rebranding effort just four months ago. Roughly 60 percent of all Vevo traffic happens on mobile devices and the GIF maker feature will arrive on the iOS version of the Vevo app at some point, according to a rep for the company emailing Digital Trends. Nevertheless, there is no word on when it will fall into the hands of Android users.

Playing around with @vevo‘s new Gif Maker feature: https://t.co/OyIdeDs0ps

— Keith Nelson Jr (@JusAire) November 8, 2016

One of the new GIF maker’s shortcomings is related to the value of these short videos to the music industry. Even though Vevo is partly owned by two of the biggest record labels in the world, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, you still will not be able to make a GIF out of a number of music videos from the two labels’ biggest artists. Ariana Grande, for example, is signed to Republic Records, a subsidiary of Universal Music Group and you will not be able to turn her Let Me Love You music video with Lil Wayne into GIFs. According to the message that you will receive if you attempt to do so, this is “due to restrictions with the rights holders.”

Vevo is working on making the GIF feature available for its full catalog of roughly 250,000 music videos, but in terms of is already well ahead of the former leader in music video GIFs: Giphy. The three-year-old database of all things GIF serves one billion endless video loops a day with more than 100 million daily active users allows users spending more than two hours watching those micro videos, daily. Giphy allows users to create GIFs from videos on YouTube, where Vevo hosts some of the most viewed music videos on the platform, yet only a small fraction of its total database.

Vevo’s venture into five-second endless loops comes weeks after Twitter announced plans to shutter Vine; a move that did not deter the music video platform. “We can’t speak to Twitter or Vine, but we know that consumer demand for GIFs, and music video GIFs in particular, is high and continues to rise,” a Vevo rep emailed to Digital Trends. You can expect more music videos to be cut up into five-second loops in the future.

The GIF that keeps on GIFing: Vevo now has a GIF maker for music videos

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