Archive for October, 2007

New Zunes to be announced tomorrow?

New Zunes to be announced tomorrow?BetaNews reports that Microsoft is to hold a special event in Redmond tomorrow, in which Bill Gates and Design and Development chief J Allard will announce a major update to the company’s line of portable media players.

Dubbed the Zune 2, one new model is reported to be flash-based and “will measure 3-inches by 1.25-inches” and look “much like the iPod nano”.

“The smaller Zunes will be video capable, and are rumored to include Wi-Fi and higher storage than competing products”, according to BetaNews.

Updated Hard drive-based models are also expected, which will look much the same as the current range, except for offering greater storage and being slightly slimmer.

In our recent analysis of Microsoft’s Zune platform (‘Is the Zune doomed?‘), Mack D. Male wrote that a major weakness, compared with Apple’s iPod, was the existence of only a single model, but also noted that there are still gaps in the market that the Zune could exploit, such as the need for high-capacity hard drive-based model with a large widescreen display suited to video. In comparison, Apple’s widescreen iPod, the Touch, is flash-based and offers a measly 16GB of storage.

Perhaps we’ll see such a model unveiled tomorrow?

Radiohead's new album challenges music industry's conventional business model

radiohead-in-the-rainbows-small.jpgThom Yorke, one of the artists behind the band Radiohead, hinted in 2003 that this day would come. Well, it’s here. Radiohead is releasing its seventh studio album, In Rainbows, completely on its own with no label and a pay-what-you-want price tag.

“I like the people at our record company, but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one,” Yorke told Time after Radiohead’s contract with EMI/Capitol expired after its release of Hail to the Thief in 2003. “And, yes, it probably would give us perverse pleasure to say ‘f*** you’ to this decaying business model.”

The long-established business model is not dead yet, but Radiohead’s bypassing the record labels is another brick out of the music industry’s wall. Radiohead is still one of the biggest bands in the world, selling millions of albums and selling out concerts around the globe. Everybody — from artists to the record labels to the music industry as a whole — will be keenly following the success, or failure, of In Rainbows because it represents a new and potentially powerful way to sell music.

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Joost on a set-top-box within 18 months

Joost on a set-top-box within 18 monthsEarlier today I asked the question: how long before we see Internet TV service, Joost, running on some kind of a set-top-box? Within “the next 18 months”, answers CEO Mike Volpi, during a video interview conducted by Liz Gannes over at NewTeeVee*, to coincide with Joost’s full public launch.

Volpi explains that Joost’s current user base is made up of a younger “early adopter” demographic who are comfortable with viewing content from the Internet TV service on a PC or Mac, as they already do when “popping in a DVD” or browsing sites like YouTube. However, for Joost to go mainstream, the service will need to run on other platforms.

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Internet TV's future: PC or set-top-box?

Internet TV's future: PC or set-top-box?Two seemingly unrelated announcements last week have got me thinking about whether the future of “full screen” Internet TV applications, such as Joost or Babelgum, reside on a PC or, instead, some sort of set-top-box which connects to a TV.

Microsoft launched a Beta version of its new MSN Video-based “Internet TV” service, compatible with “Extenders for Media Center” devices from Cisco, D-Link, and HP; and Jaman published a software hack — albeit, unsupported — to enable content from its movie download store to work with the AppleTV.

Other online video services to have already aligned with hardware manufacturers include BitTorrent, which released an SDK for set-top boxes, Network-Attached Storage (NAS) devices, and media extenders; Google-owned YouTube with their strong partnership with Apple; and DivX who are busy shopping around their “Connected” media extender hardware reference design to Asian consumer electronics companies.

What all of the above companies are betting, to varying degrees, is that for all the social and interactive advantages of online video, certain kinds of content, particularly long form programing, still wants to be viewed from the couch on a large widescreen TV.

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