Tag: streaming
Blinkbox offers blockbuster movie streaming
Blinkbox has launched the UK’s first paid-for streaming movie site and signed a bumper deal with Warner Bros to boot.
The deal gives Blinkbox the rights to stream over 1,100 full-length feature movies and TV programmes. Big name launch titles include The Dark Knight and Body of Lies as well as TV shows like Friends.
Blinkbox also has deals with E1 Entertainment, Cinetic Rights Management, Revolver Entertainment, Eagle Vision, Black Diamond, Raindance and X-Treme Video. In total they now have over 1,400 titles – comprising more than 1,500 hours.
Of course, there are plenty on non-paid-for streaming movie sites, although the legality of these is questionable and the quality of their streams is usually pretty shoddy.
There are, also, services available such as those by Apple and LoveFilm that allow you to download films at a cost, although the service for Blinkbox will allow instant streaming, so no waiting around for your chosen film to finish downloading.
Rental prices are pretty much on par with services like LoveFilm – £2.49 for oldies and £3.49 for new releases. You can also buy titles for £7.99 – £11.99 – although why anyone would buy a digital version of a movie when they could buy a hard copy (and create their own digital version if they wish to) for about the same price, baffles me.
Three streaming options are offered – high at 1088kbps, medium at 544kpbs and low at 272kbps. If you’re not sure what sort of speeds your internet connection can handle run a speed test to find out.
The movie deals add to what was already a pretty cool service from Blinkbox. We first told you about them back in February last year. As well as paid-for content, users also have access to free TV shows, such as Peep Show, without even having to sign up.
Users can also create ‘blinks’ from a library of clips that numbers more than 20,000. These clips can be further edited by the users and messages can also be attached. These blinks can then be emailed to friends or embedded into blogs or other web pages.
iTunes' variable pricing coincides with plummeting sales
Initial reports from major labels are suggesting that the switch to variable pricing on iTunes has been a failure. According to ‘numerous sources’ sales decreases have been seen across the board since variable pricing was implemented at Macworld back in January.
But lets remember the statisticians’ mantra – correlation is not causation. Just because sales decreases have been seen alongside the implementation of variable pricing, it doesn’t mean that the latter is causing the former.
Just as likely is the effect of services like Spotify on consumers’ music-listening habits. Although the streaming service is unavailable in the States, where these figures are mostly likely from, there are plenty of other similar applications that consumers are beginning to explore.
As people shift from ownership of music to being happy with just access when they need it, sales will decrease. On the flipside, licensing revenues skyrocket, so the same amount of cash is still floating around for music creators – this isn’t the death of the music industry.
(via Digital Music News)
MP3 pricing war erupts between Apple and Amazon
Today, Apple finally implements the variable pricing that has been promised since label renegotiations in January, but the company must be seething a little that Amazon grabbed all the headlines yesterday with an offer featuring chart-topping MP3s for just 30p.
The deal, featuring artists like Lady Gaga, Kings of Leon, Coldplay and La Roux, will tempt yet more consumers over to Amazon’s DRM-free, easy-to-understand platform from the bloated iTunes ecosystem.
But the funny thing here is that we’re not really talking about music fans. We’re talking about mums and dads, people who buy the occasional track but don’t really keep up with much new music or go to gigs.
The kind of people who buy albums in Tesco, not independent record shops. They’re the people that the record labels successfully marketed CDs to in the 90s, but who are now switching to casual gaming and television since music is so omnipresent in everyday life. They simply don’t need to buy it any more.
Amazon’s strategy seems two-fold. Firstly it wants to steal customers off iTunes – that much is clear by the timing of yesterday’s announcement. It also wants to grow the digital download market, though, by marketing MP3s at people buying CDs, books and DVDs from the site.
Ultimately the whole thing is futile, though, as the general public follows the early adopters from ownership of MP3s to access to vast streaming libraries. Already, pretty much everyone who’s interested in listening to music on their computer has tried Spotify.
Personally speaking, my music listening within the last couple of years has already shifted entirely from my MP3 collection to Spotify and Last.fm. The only time I go back is to listen to obscurer stuff that Spotify doesn’t have, and even then I sometimes don’t bother – I just listen to something Spotify *does* have.
At Christmas, I showed Spotify to my Dad. I’ve never seen him so enthralled by a bit of software – he spent a solid four hours playing with it. Whenever I show it to people are resolutely not early adopters they’re amazed by it too.
That’s why I’m so sure that the pricing war doesn’t matter. As soon as the general public properly discovers Spotify, and when Spotify sorts out its mobile clients, then they won’t need Amazon, iTunes or anyone else. They’ll be converts to “access”, and they won’t go back.
Spotify and 7Digital buddy up
Digital music upstart-of-the-moment Spotify has added yet another revenue stream to its growing collection – users are now able to right-click tracks to buy them via 7Digital.
Currently, the click just takes you to the relevant 7Digital page for the album. In the future, however, the companies hope to allow one-click downloads in Spotify itself, as well as functionality to buy entire playlists.
This move should further silence the doubters who claim that Spotify has no business model. On the contrary, this is now a third solid way of monetising their business, after ads and premium subscriptions. I do doubt a little how much people will use the functionality, though.
Fizy – super-quick streaming of songs and music videos
Are you a big fan of Spotify, but you’d like it to be more… illegal? Fizy is for you. It’s a super-quick website that’ll let you search for songs and music videos. I’m not kidding about super-quick, we’re talking ‘faster than searching your MP3 folder’ quick, on par with the aforementioned Spotify.
That’s not the only similarity. It’s got a very clean interface with minimal features and you can easily share tracks with other people. It claims to have more than 75 billion MP3s in its index, and you can expand or remove any videos involved.
Very impressive, and very useful for ‘do you know that song?’ moments. Not exactly a media player, though, as there’s no playlist functionality. I quite like that, though. That’s what I’ve got Spotify for.
Fizy (via @mychemtoilet)
Image courtesy of Lifehacker.
BlackBerry launching TV streaming application?
Rumours abound that BlackBerry will be launching a TV streaming service next week that’ll let users watch their favourite episodes of TV shows from their handsets.
There’s scarce detail other than that, but it seems like it’ll be a flat-rate subscription per month for a service, it’ll use a device’s Wi-Fi connection, and multiple content providers have been confirmed.
Given BlackBerry’s current keenness on applications, this announcement wouldn’t be out of kilter with their overall strategy. It’s interesting that they’re avoiding 3G, relying on Wi-Fi instead. Just think of the shows as video podcasts, I suppose, and it all makes sense.
(via NewTeeVee)
Last.fm bans third party mobile streaming applications
Last.fm has had rather a bad day for PR, making two very big, very bad announcements for its consumers. First of all, the company announced in a forum post they’re removing access to their API for third party mobile applications. That means that users of Mobbler on S60, Pocket Scrobbler on Windows Mobile, and FlipSide on BlackBerry devices will soon find themselves without a way of listening on the go.
The ‘official’ applications for the iPhone and Android will remain in action, which seems a little odd. If this is a licensing problem, surely the same rules are in place for whatever platform the content is delivered on? Relatedly, the service will also be stopping non-subscribers from accessing the radio APIs, simply because Last.fm wants more money.
Secondly, the company also announced in a blog post that it will begin charging for its previously free service outside of three countries – the UK, the USA and Germany. Customers anywhere else will be charged a fairly slim €3 per month for the service.
The company admits that the reason for this change is because it’s having trouble selling ads outside of these markets. The UK, USA and Germany all have relatively mature ad markets, where funding the service through advertising alone is possible. Outside of these countries, though, the company is having trouble.
What will remain free for all users is the scrobbling aspect of the site – where it charts your music taste and allows you to compare taste with friends and other users, as well as the social network that sits on top of everything. Although I’ve never pushed very hard to fill out my friends list on Last.fm, it’s grown incrementally over the years and now it’s not too bad.
I’m deeply disappointed that I’ll be losing access to Mobbler, even if it was a little rickety and didn’t work properly on the bus. Let’s hope that services like Slacker make their way over this side of the Atlantic sooner rather than later.
OnLive – top end PC gaming on your TV for less than a subscription to Xbox Live
I started out as a PC gamer with a 486 and single speed CD drive. I was one of those people who entered the constant upgrading loop to try and keep up with the must have games of the time. Then something happened: I moved out and had to deal with rent and bills – suddenly keeping my PC up to date wasn’t quite the priority of yesteryear and I slipped slowly into console ownership. But what if there were a way to play the latest PC games in top resolution through your TV without the need to upgrade your hardware? And what if this were to cost less than the current consoles on the market? Well, I think at that point I’d probably proudly clutch my mouse once more, but that’s never going to happen, right? Wrong, if OnLive has anything to do with it.
The OnLive service, seven years in the making, will allow games to stream games to their front room – it’s essentially cloud gaming. Whereas previously your controller of choice would play the game in the same room, now you’ll be controlling the game on OnLive’s central servers, where the video will be streamed back to you. All you need is a basic computer – even a netbook should do it – and a broadband connection to send and receive the data.
Spotify signs up a quarter of a million UK users, and 800,000 a million users worldwide
Ad-supported streaming music service Spotify has managed to recruit a quarter of a million UK users to its excellent music service. It’s a nice milestone for the service which is the most exciting thing I’ve seen in digital music for a long time.
But Spotify isn’t resting on its laurels. On its official blog, the company is inviting users to hassle their favourite bands and labels to join the service. They recommend hunting down a band’s label, cross-referencing it with their uber-list of labels they have deals with, and if it doesn’t match, then asking them to email [email protected].
What are you missing that you want to hear on the service? Go hunt them down, and then tell us in the comments below.
(via NMA)
The Revolution Will Be Streaming
This is my 1,000th post on Tech Digest. My first was about Robopong, and I have no idea what my last will be about, but this one’s about the economics of free music, which is a subject that I’ve touched on many times while writing here. It’s about how a free download turned me into a massive fan of a band.
Yesterday, personalized streaming radio site Last.fm announced on Twitter, that its free downloads page was back. It’s a page, which can be found here, that lists a bunch of tracks that bands have decided to give away, for promotional purposes. According to the old thinking prevalent among record companies, a download = a lost sale. In this case, a download led me to a whole lot more than that.
The download in question is a song called, wonderfully, “The Revolution Will Be Streaming“, a nod to Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 classic “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised“. It’s by an American post-rock band that I hadn’t previously heard of called Saxon Shore.
My eye was caught by the title, and I downloaded it on the off-chance I’d like it. I did like it, a lot, and after a few listens, I headed over to Amazon. The band’s got a few tracks available on the download store, but the album featuring “The Revolution Will Be Streaming”, “The Exquisite Death of Saxon Shore” wasn’t. So I bought the CD instead. On import.
Because the album has to be sent over from the states, I’m looking at a couple of weeks before I can listen to the damn thing. So I checked Spotify. The band isn’t there, sadly. I realized that when it does arrive, all I’m going to do is rip it to high-bitrate MP3 and put in on my Zune, so my next step was to head right over to the Pirate Bay and see if I could find it.
Turns out that the site doesn’t (at the time of searching, anyway). Luckily I’ve got other sources, so I grabbed it from another tracker and this morning on the bus on the way into the office, a bizarre and unexpected diversion around the back roads of King’s Cross was made all the more lovely by Saxon Shore’s wonderful album.
The band doesn’t seem to be touring at the moment, but when they show up in London, I’ll definitely be there and I’m fully intending to drag down as many of my post-rock-friendly friends as I can. I might well buy a t-shirt, and when I’ve fully digested this album, if I’m still loving it then there’s a good chance I’ll buy some of the older ones.
Now, I’m not pretending that there’s millions of people doing what I did above. Nor am I pretending that this would work just as well if every band in the world started giving away tracks. But if Saxon Shore hadn’t given away that song, then they wouldn’t have gained me as a fan. That’s why free music works, why music blogs are the best way to find new bands, and why free music isn’t the devaluing of art that some claim it is.
I welcome your comments and thoughts on the above, but before you do, go listen to the track in question. You can stream it from Last.fm here. The revolution will indeed be streaming, it would appear.
