Video Valve is a personalized music video channel from Viacom. As you rate videos and add artists to your channel, VV learns about your tastes and fine-tunes your video playlist accordingly. You can also further influence programming by adjusting popularity and freshness sliders.

While the UI looks simple and straightforward its is very problematic. When you type in a an artist name, you will see live search results. Unfortunately, many items that display in the live search box are actually not represented in the catalog (it would be better to just restrict results to available content). There is also no difference between your play queue and search results - if you search for something new (or click an artist or director name), the results replace your play queue. Not only that, but it often inserts songs you have just listened to. It would be better to have the queue and results separate and provide the ability to add items from the results to the queue. This approach would also alleviate the site’s biggest problem - there is no apparent way to get back and access your personalized channel based on items you have rated.



Ratings are also problematic - you can only rate videos but not artists. I may very much like an artist but not like a particular song and VV does not seem to have an understandable method for how this common occurrence is handled. There is also no way to see videos you have rated. Additionally, the site does not provide any data regarding what album the video is from or links to purchase songs.

VV does provide a nice selection of good quality video (that surpasses services that rely on poorly encoded or labeled YouTube for their content) and it’s fun to click around and check out different artists. However, the problems of the service are significant and need to be addressed before it can graduate to a truly compelling offering.