Last.fm just released some new video features yesterday including the ability to embed Last.fm video wherever you want on the web, watch the video fullscreen and scrobble it to your Last.fm profile. The embedded video displays a video frame, a large play button, metadata and playback controls. Once you click the play button, the metadata disappears and the video begins. To see the metadata, just roll over the video. Fullscreen mode is very nice and seems to playback with little problems.

My biggest complaint about Last.FM’s video offering is that there simply is not enough video yet. Out of all my top artists, I could only find less than a handful that had any videos associated with them. What’s more annoying, each artist detail page still has a video tab that just links to empty content. They should just suppress the video tab if there are no associated videos and stop wasting my time hunting for phantoms. Additionally, the current implementation does not recommend videos on my Dashboard or include them on the Tag Detail pages - for instance, I should be able to see top videos from artists who were tagged “French Pop”.

Its still early, and there is a promising future here when a significant video catalog is available, but in the meantime, I’ll stick with YouTube or one of the many great Last.fm/YouTube mashup services.