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?

Now to the service itself. It does take 30 seconds or so load up whilst it updates the video lists, which is sluggish but not too terrible. It runs smoothly and looks typically slick, just as most of Sony’s services do. The menus are a little strange at first, but you get used to them quickly and it all starts to feel a little better, if a little awkward in places.

The application is said to have launched with 10,000 music videos, though we sure as hell won’t be counting them, and they all load up instantly, with barely a millisecond space between pressing the button and seeing the first few seconds. The videos are sorted by genre, artist and song title, or there’s quite a selection of recommended playlists, from the charts to hard rock, so you’ll never be lost for choice if you just want to discovered something new.

There are a few artists that aren’t in there yet that you might want (where in hell is Lynyrd Skynyrd!?), though we’re sure they’ll be updating the library. Other than those, the selection is impressive, there’s something for every taste in here, from pop to hard rock, rap to…whatever the pseudo-opposite of rap happens to be. The likes of Lady Gaga, Dizzee Rascal all the way down to Pink Floyd and Audioslave, so if you can’t find something you like you’re a very, very picky bugger.

You can queue any song to play, which will disappear after you close the application unless you decide to go and save it as a playlist, or you can just create playlists whilst you listen to the songs you’ve queued. You can name and write a description for your playlists, which is an obvious choice, really. Whilst you’re looking through the video library the video that is playing is confined to a space on the left, if you press select it’ll bring it up to almost-full screen, which is more of a letterbox than full screen, oddly. The other controls are similar to listening to MP3s, L1/R1 go back to the previous/skip to the next video, L2/R2 rewind/fastforward, start pauses, triangle brings up an options menu. Video quality is decent, but not amazing, though streaming better quality would probably have quite an effect on your bandwidth.

There are a few more features, too, like the ability to download a video for your phone (for a price, of course), and a search function, though having to scroll between all of the letters one-by-one is a strange choice they could’ve just let us use the damn on-screen keyboard instead, but it’s manageable, if not ideal.

Overall, VidZone is a great service. It’s slick, fast (once it’s loaded) and well featured. If it gets a lot of support, hopefully some updates to iron out a few odd choices, it will be perfect. As it is now, it’s still a great application for use at parties – if you can tear yoursef away from your games long enough to throw any, that is. We’ll be using it, will you?

Filed under: Review, VidZone