UMG, Google Team for Exclusive Music Site VEVO: MediaBytes with Shelly Palmer April 10, 2009

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Universal Music Group and Google will partner to launch a separate music video destination. Dubbed VEVO, the site will act as a supplement and possible replacement to UMG’s YouTube channel. While UMG will not remove music videos from YouTube, which has had an extremely tough time developing a profitable business plan, UMG affiliated music videos on YouTube will stream through a “special VEVO branded embedded player.”

CBSSports.com streamed more than 8.6 million hours of college basketball during March Madness. The streaming campaign centered around the NCAA’s annual tournament increased viewership by 75% over last year, when 4.76 million hours of video were streamed during the tournament. CBSSports.com took in more than 7.52 million unique visitors during the tournament.

French legislators rejected President Sarkozy’s plan to enact a three strike anti-piracy bill. The bill, which received a lot of coverage, was reportedly slated to be passed after being approved by Parliament and the Senate. The bill proposed that both the music and film industry would have access to web analytics detailing the download records of Internet users and would subsequently be able to report violations.

Facebook announced that it has blocked links to the Pirate Bay. The torrent sharing site recently launched a feature that let users share links on the social network, however, Facebook believes that sharing links to torrents may result in bitter copyright lawsuits. A spokesperson for Facebook noted that “Given the controversy surrounding The Pirate Bay and the pending lawsuit against them, we’ve reached out to The Pirate Bay and asked them to remove the ‘Share on Facebook’ links from their site. The Pirate Bay has not responded and so we have blocked their torrents from being shared on Facebook.”