Vidzone is being rolled out to 'Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, New Zealand, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Austria, Switzerland and Portugal during Q4 2009!!' That's a lot of places, if you ask us. It's a great service, so it's nice to see it getting spread around to other areas.

We don't have a date, just a Q4 2009, but it's better than nothing, right?

Vidzone just keeps bringing in the exclusives, doesn't it? This time, we've got some Placebo coming up, from their album Battle for the Sun. The songs are The Never Ending Why and Ashtray Heart, and they'll go live on Wednesday, so you've got a good two days of notice.

It's Placebo, and Placebo are awesome, so to warm yourself up, go watch the videos for Infra-red and Pure Morning, it'll warm you up Wednesday or, even better, calm you down for the huge rush of news that will be coming in from GamesCom tomorrow. We'll be listening.

The EU PS Blog says that VidZone has been updated, adding 500 songs and some playlists. The songs include Chaka Khan, Freemasons, Grizzly Bear, Maximo Park, and a load more. The new playlists are BBQ Music, just in time for Summer, 90's, Metal Anthems and Dizzee Rascal, for some reason. Great stuff, go check it out (if you're in the EU).

From the mind of SCEE comes some wonderful things, sometimes. Sure, they can make a few mistakes - the PSN store categories, for example - but sometimes they can really blindside us with some astonishing features. VidZone is such a feature. You can see a trailer here, though it's useless because the service barely looks even similar to that. You can see some screenshots from the actual application here, though, so that's useful. It's just a 20mb download and, after installing, it appears under the music tab of your XMB.

Released exclusively onto the EU PSN on Thursday, VidZone is a music video streaming application and, best of all, it's completely free. The trade-off for being free is that it's all ad-supported, but they're just a few squares or rectangles with mostly PS3-related things, so they're not intrusive in the slightest. Except, that is, when you've got a video playing on full screen, and the bar that contains the band and song name keeps coming up when the ad that's in it changes. It's barely a niggle, though, and it keeps the service free, so who are we to complain? Read more »