VuHaus music video site launches with live concert streams from the Non-Comm convention

Look out, YouTube. Move over, Vimeo.

There's a new online home for music videos, a kinder, gentler website and mobile app (partly) grown and launching in Philadelphia on Wednesday.

VuHaus ("view house"), as it's called, is backed by six public radio stations, including WXPN-FM, and promises a panoramic perspective on "adult alternative" music styles - from Americana to electronica, blues to rap to rock.

It's opening the portal with an impressive crop of live concert streams from Wednesday through Friday from the Non-Comm (noncommercial radio) Convention, holding forth at the World Cafe Live/WXPN-FM "clubhouse" in University City.

Attendees are paying $100 to $250 to participate in Non-Comm. But VuHaus site snoopers can tap in, and watch noon and nighttime show sets free - featuring radio staples Brandi Carlile, Blues Traveler, and Brian Wilson; cult faves like Calexico, Best Coast, and JJ Grey & Mofro, next big things Elle King, Israel Nash, Natalie Prass and Ryley Walker; plus Philly faves Dr. Dog and Son Little.

Free and with limited ad interruptions, the service will also be stocked with video performance clips homegrown at XPN and other noncommercial stations with an alt-rocking heart. VuHaus looks and functions differently from other streaming sites.

While happy to lead you by the hand, this "new music discovery video platform" has a laid-back, almost rustic vibe. Artist biographies and tour itineraries appear to have been "printed" on an old-school typewriter, for example.

"VuHaus is meant to reflect the nonprofit, public media aesthetic and sensibility," said WXPN general manager and VuHaus board chairman Roger LaMay. "The site is not the star. You won't ever see a corporate music video or suffer a barrage of pop-up commercials. Our intent is to expose and nurture emerging artists - national, regional and local - with exclusive performance clips curated by contributing stations, recorded in our studios and concerts."

"We're here to champion styles of music that often get lost in the YouTube shuffle, where literally millions of videos never get more than a single view," added VuHaus program director Mark Abuzzahab. "We're not here to sell you a chunk of cheese."

Two years in the making (and first announced at last May's 14th annual Non-Comm), VuHaus was born out of conversations LaMay initiated with the general managers of KCRW (Santa Monica, Calif.) and KUTX (Austin, Texas). "Our thinking was, we should be acting as allies rather than rivals, that we should be doing something together," he said. "Then an entrepreneurial group, Public Media Co., came along and proposed the idea of a video service, leveraging all the original content we've been capturing for broadcast and streaming. It just made perfect sense."

Likewise to fellow-cofounders at KEXP, Seattle (which alone has amassed a collection of 8,000 video clips), WFUV in New York City, and KTBG in Kansas City - with more participants waiting in the wings. To lure stations into the fold, VuHaus offers each a site within the site to tout homegrown talents and acts coming to town, plus easy linking to and from VuHaus with each station's own website.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has seeded the project to the tune of $750,000. "That's the first sizable collaboration grant CPB has ever given to music stations," LaMay beamed.

Significant contributions here from the Knight Arts Challenge, Wyncote Foundation, and 25th Century Foundation have helped World Cafe Live upgrade in-house video production facilities "so we can now shoot for VuHaus in both concert rooms," said its president and founder, Hal Real. (The build-out was initially funded to launch the interdisciplinary LiveConnections streaming music series.)

WXPN's adjacent main performance studio also is on the same video switching network, and is wired with an array of "fixed position" (unmanned) cameras plus portables "that we'll also take out to capture things" like the July 24 to 26 XPoNential Music Festival, said LaMay.

While VuHaus is "starting small" and "a work in progress," Abuzzahab said, "there's enough backbone" from Amazon.com to support lots of simultaneous streams with "high-resolution audio and video quality. The site won't crash, if we're successful."