The company wants to eventually take Vevo TV to cable distributors to compete heads-on with MTV, according to an Adweek report, and it is also thinking about launching genre-specific live streams. Think Vevo Hip Hop, for example. But ultimately, going live is all about devices and the way they’re changing how we watch TV.

Vevo has put a lot of work into apps for mobile and connected devices, which it built in-house with the help of a small team of San Francisco-based developers. Mobile was a big success for the company early on, and the launch of the Xbox app a year ago “turned out to be wildly successful,” as Vevo’s product and tech SVP Michael Cerda put it when we talked about the subject a few months ago.

Vevo followed up with a Roku app in December, and Cerda told me that he wants to tackle additional connected TV platforms as soon as possible. “There is a huge opportunity for us there,” Cerda said.

Continuous playback combined with curation makes a whole lot of sense for something like music videos on connected TVs. Users don’t want to pick up their remote control to pick and choose every single video, but instead want something up and running in the background without interruption. And if a viewer is ever bored by what’s playing on Vevo TV’s live stream, then there’s always tons of on-demand content available right within the same app. It’s the best of both worlds.

So how do Vevo’s cable plans fit into this? Cable obviously has a much wider reach than a device like Roku, but the real lure are cable-sized ad-budgets. One could argue that Vevo might compete with itself if the same programming is available on cable set-top boxes and connected devices. But ultimately, those set-top-boxes are changing, and the distinctions between streaming and cable distribution are going to become less and less visible to consumers (to hear more about the future of TV, check out our paidContent conference in New York next month).

In that world, a live TV channel – distributed on as many platforms as possible – will guarantee that consumers will always access to Vevo, no matter whether they’re streaming or viewing plain old TV. And that’s a smart move.

Vevo is by far the biggest video publisher on YouTube. Recent comScore numbers show that Vevo clocked close to 565 million video views and more than 50 million unique viewers on the site in December alone. There are few other publishers on YouTube who come close to those view counts, and no one else engages so many people. Check out the chart below for details:

Vevo’s deal with YouTube was up. Vevo had been distributing its videos on YouTube ever since its launch at the end of 2009, but its deal with the Google-owned video site ended in December, and there had been persistent rumors that Facebook had shown interest in stealing Vevo away from YouTube. With a new deal, Google can deepen its ties with Vevo, ensuring that it will be able to show major label-owned videos for years to come.

Mobile and TV is getting bigger. This one is a bit of a long-shot, but worth considering nonetheless. More and more music videos are consumed on mobile and connected devices, be it phones, iPads or Xboxes. Vevo recognizes this, and has put lots of work into some pretty slick mobile and connected apps. The problem for YouTube is that it isn’t seeing any of the money from those mobile plays: Vevo is delivering and monetizing videos to mobile and connected devices on its own. It’s unclear whether this new deal would immediately change anything about this, but it’s possible that YouTube wants to get a foot in the door to eventually get a piece of this cake as well.