The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘streaming’

I’m here at the last keynote of SXSW, where Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is being interviewed by Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk. Ek will likely be revealing some new announcements about Spotify during this interview. I’ll be live blogging my notes below.

Van Buskirk kicked off the keynote by asking how many people in the audience had used Spotify, leading a significant portion of the audience to raise their hands. This was surprising, because Spotify is only widely available in Europe (you need a beta invite to use it in the US). Ek then took some time to walk the audience through the streaming music service if they haven’t used it before (see our extensive past coverage if you need a refresher).

Q: What drove the initial decision to make this an application as opposed to something in the browser?
A: There are a few things that applications are better for. In our case, we think that applications are better for swift music playback. What we see is that people tend to spend a lot of time on Spotify because it’s so swift. They tend to replace their media player with Spotify, because they notice no difference between playing a song locally (some have even remarked that it’s faster than playing it through iTunes).

Q: Let’s talk about the licensing realities. Spotify is available in Europe. How will the model work in America?
A:There could be slight changes. A year and a half since launch more than 7 users, only in six countries. What we’re working on is the next gen of Spotify. We’ll never be content to just have an app. There are a lot of things we want to fix in Spotify. We tend not to take the ‘release early, often’ approach. What we’ve been working on for last 6-8 months is next gen of Spotify. How to make it more connected. Easier sharing and management of music. We’ve realized people spend a lot of time on Spotify and they tend to manage their music with Spotify.

Q: Which platforms/devices are most exciting?
A: Three years ago if you wanted to develop for mobile, had to support 3-5 major mobile os’s. Long lead times. That shut out all this innovation. More recently, application devs can get the application on phones. We look a lot at bundling with devices. Mostly not for revenue possibility but more for pre-installs. With exception of the iPhone today, most of the other handset manufacturers lack a good media player. Historically hard to get music to other phones if you had in iTunes.

Q: Let’s talk about the business side of bundling. If someone is paying for cell phone bill, they can check off something to get Spotify, seems like easier decision. How has that been going in Europe?
A: We have two mobile operators working with us many more to come. If you go into any Telius store in Sweden, you can go in and pick out a smart phone that comes preinstalled with Spotify. 3-6 months included. Incredible takeup with that. One of the key things Spotify is pushing is that people listen/share to more music than ever, more diverse artists. People will still buy music they love, but vast majority of music they just want access.

Q: We’ve heard services like Spotify people say “oh no we’re not going to buy music any more”. The idea of geting people to play a monthly fee, that seems promising. Why would someone buy something?
A: I think we’re going that route. But we find that music I really love, I tend to want to buy it. Not necessarily a plastic disk, but a special edition for an artist I really like, I’m more than happy to pay $100 for a box set with a t-shirt in it, liner notes. Another person may be willing to pay for a live edition with extended tracks. Or pay for a live concert experience. The reality of the music industry today is that there isn’t one biz model. It’s about figuring out how to use downloads, streaming, promotion, ticketing, all these things. I don’t think streaming music is stream.. with Spotify people label us ‘free’ music. But people pay, either with time (adverts, which are targeting), or actually paying for the service.

Q: Are you going to start filtering ads by mood (e.g. if you listen to down tempo music).
A: We want to figure out a lot of things based on how people listen to music. Can figure out mood, brand preferences. We see that from CTRs, if you listen to same music and are from the same place who tends to like a certain brand, there’s a high likihood you will too. Ad model is getting better every month. But this for me is not about free vs paid music, it’s about a model where there’s a free music element and a paid one.

A: Tech savviness at labels is increasing, now more people that love music and know the digital space are working with labels and artists.

Q: How do indy artists get music on Spotify? On ITunes you can submit paperwork. You’re different in that approach.
A: The way to get on Spotify today is we have a bunch of aggregators we work with. Main reason we’ve wanted to work with aggregators is that they tend to understand format/structure. We get quality control, picture, bio, etc.

Q: Are we done with DRM?
A: If you look at Spotify, it has DRM associated with it. We want to make it so that there isn’t really any announcement what’s DRM or not, we can protect and give users flexibility you want.

Q: Let’s talk about Spotify of the future. How do we get to point of ‘music like water’.
A: I see that’s sort of where we’re heading. The music industry needs that happen. I think music and tech are aligned for the first time. We’ve had a lot of proprietary standards, trying to figure out how to get music on a BlackBerry phone vs. getting it on iPhone vs set top box, radically different. We need to open platforms.

Q: With regard to Twitter/FB. Are you thinking of integrating sharing functionality into Spotify?
A: We’re looking at integrating some social aspects. I think genres are non-sane. What classifies rock, or neo-pop, etc. Spotify is quickly approaching 10 mil tracks. How do you manage that? Search is one solution, but isn’t optimal way of discovering new content. We won’t be another social network. We never believed in being our own social network, we’re working with existing social networks.

Q: With your playlists people have read/write access, can delete entire thing, what are you doing about that?
A: Looking from tech angle. We support version updates. One way to solve that is that you can step back in history and go back. What we don’t have is user privilege on playlists. We think Twitter/FB will figure out those privileges, and will use them.

A: I think the total rev matters more than actual conversion rate. But we do want to make sure there are a number people are paying for Spotify and that will grow. We’re making a lot of progress. We’re in six countries, now well in excess of 320,000 paid subscribers. Last time we mentioned a fig. it was 260,000. 100 million playlists. 7 million users. People spend a lot of time on playlists. 30% of all playlists are albums (albums stored in collection). People say album is dead. I don’t agree. I think there’s a lot to develop there.

Q: Let’s talk about P2P element.
A: It was a key decision, and one reason we’re a native app. Helps offload bandwidth. P2P actually helps Spotify and users, it will take tracks on your friends and coworkers on same local network and stream to them so it’s faster. “We’re consuming more capacity than Sweden has as a country”. If we had to stream all the data from our UK center, we’d consume all the bandwidth.

Q: Why isn’t Apple doing this?
A: That’s a million dollar question. I think they are. I’m just speculating on this. Apple is very interested, we’ve had iTunes store. They’re understanding this is more to subscription model. They understand it’s going more to a cloud based model. I don’t have any magical insight into Apple.

Q: Let’s look at Spotify on this phone. I wanted to show this cool device. Sony Ericson X10 mini. Out in US in next couple of months. It’s an Android phone. We’ve installed Spotify. Now demonstrating the app. Has a spotify widget.

A: Over the next couple of weeks a lot of features coming in to Spotify. I hope from them moving in a more steady direction. We are listening to what users are asking us to do.

Q: US Launch? Also China?
A: The most important thing for us when it comes to US launch is that we want to build the best possible product we can and get all ducks in a row, partnerships with next gen of Spotify. Sort out publishing which is a huge task. Here you have to strike deals with almost 5000 publishers. Big thing for us is working on next gen of Spotify and getting that out there.

Q: How many plays equals one dollar?
A: Depends on the type on contract with the publisher/record labels. We share the rev we bring in. You can’t really equate to ‘per play’ we look at all our ad rev. Creates a bucket. For instance how do you account for a purchase of a song. There is no easy answer to your question. Over time our ad revs are growing, number of downloads growing. Amount of rev we bring in is growing.

Q: How are it working to convince American label that not everyone needs to be a subscriber for it to work.
A: This is the world’s biggest music market. We have potential reach of 170 mil people in Europe. America has much more. People spend more money in America. The whole industry is looking more and more about new opportunities. At the same time CD sales have been in decline, nothing online has been able to counter balance that decline. I think people are looking at how we can support Spotify, how do we ensure that people don’t stop buying CDs.

The battle between Google and Apple continues. RJ Pittman, a prominent product manager at Google, has left the company to join Apple. We’ve been tipped off to a tweet he sent out two days ago that said “My last day at Google. Incredible experience. Amazing people. Moved mountains. Next chapter. Hello Apple.” Pittman has since removed the tweet from his Twitter feed, but judging by the tweets still visible in Twitter search, it’s true.

We’ve also received an email that Pittman  sent to his coworkers and friends about the move (we’ve redacted a paragraph about hanging out with his family during his time off):

Yesterday was my last day directing traffic at Google. It has been an incredible ride, and an amazing experience. Google is one of the most fascinating companies to work for. Working at Google scale is pretty incredible and the people are one of a kind, to say the least. It’s been an amazing 3 years of my career. It was very hard to say goodbye to all the people I call family at the Googleplex around the world. The company afforded me the opportunity to be ‘me’ inside the walls of a 20,000 person company that generates $20B in revenue. For that, I will always be grateful. I learned so much about the world, our users, and most of all…me. I left with a very heavy heart yesterday. Leaving was much harder that I expected. Admittedly, I’m feeling a bit useless today, my first day as a Xoogler. But I’m hoping this feeling will wear off soon. (Noogler is our term for a newly hired Googler, and Xooglers are the band of ex-Google alumni)

I was sprung from Google by a little company down the road that you might have heard of called Apple. Some might say I owe most of my career in technology to a little start up company that created the computer that I first learned to program, the Apple II, in 1980. By 1984, my life would be changed forever with the introduction of the most revolutionary creation of the decade, the Macintosh. A year later I would find myself spending more time with my first Mac than any other living being for my foreseeable teenage future. I’ve owned almost one of every Apple product released since then, and still own my first Mac that started it all some 25 years ago. In a strange but not so strange way, this is a sort of homecoming for me, despite never having worked for Apple. Life works in curious ways, and I love it when every so often it comes full circle. I couldn’t be more excited for what lies ahead. They’ve created a pretty neat role for me, which I will be able to talk about soon after I’ve started working there.
…

It’s unclear exactly what project Pittman is working on (his email only says that it’s a “pretty neat role for me”) and there’s little chance Apple’s PR team is going to give us any guidance. That said, my hunch is that he was recruited at the behest of the Lala team.

Apple acquired the streaming music service in December, less than two months after Google and Lala worked in tandem to launch Google OneBox Music Search. Pittman was one of the key players on that project, and worked closely with Lala to get it off the ground.

That said, Apple could be after his other talents — Pittman had previously presented at the launches of other search-related products, including a Google Labs event. And before that, he founded Groxis.

We’d previously heard that Google and Apple had a gentlemen’s agreement not to poach each other’s employees. Obviously, that’s no longer the case.

Earlier this year, Google landed a “landmark” deal with Global Cricket Ventures, the licensing partner to the Indian Premier League (IPL), which would give them the so rights to live stream cricket matches from the IPL on YouTube. This is a huge deal because the streaming of the 2010 IPL season (which starts on Friday and lasts for 45 days) is the first time a large-scale global sporting event will be streamed; with the reach expected to be at least a half-a-billion viewers. Now of of India’s largest gaming companies, Indiagames, has bought the official gaming rights to the IPL tournament to deliver games around the Indian cricket tournament.

Indiagames will be launching a series of web and mobile apps throughout the next 45 days. The first app, called IPL Indiagames T20 Fever, is an online game that uses Facebook Connect to allow users to create cricket teams consisting of both Facebook friends and IPL professional cricketers. The game will also include micro-transaction support, allowing users to users to virtually buy IPL players to improve their chances of becoming the IPL Champion.

A second, not yet released online game, called ‘IPL Indiagames 140Cricket’ will be based on a “Cricket Manager” concept and will target Twitter and Facebook users to construct and manage teams. The gaming company will also be rolling out a Facebook game as well. Indiagames partnered with Facebook to develop all three of the games.

While the IPL tournament will be streaming on YouTube, the fact that the official game will have a presence on Facebook will certainly draw Indian cricket fans to the social network. This should help give Facebook an edge over rival social network Orkut in India.

For at least the past hour, Netflix has been down. Normally, this wouldn’t be a huge deal since as they note, “Our shipping centers are continuing to send and receive DVDs , so your movies will be processed as usual.” But, increasingly, Netflix is becoming a streaming video service. And while that aspect is up and running on the third-party devices (such as the Xbox 360) that it works on, it’s obviously not working on the web. And given Netflix’s awesome customer service, I bet that means refunds are coming.

As we noted back in August, Netflix sent a message to its subscribers (who were connecting through Xboxes) noting some brief downtime for their streaming service. Along with the message, they were offering a 2% credit to be applied to your next monthly payment if you were affected. You simply had to click on a link to claim the refund (and you could actually do it even if you weren’t affected, if you didn’t mind lying). A couple weeks ago, Netflix sent out the same notice following a similar downtime.

It will be interesting to see what Netflix offers its customers for this downtime, which is obviously much more widespread. As they note on the site right now, “Our engineers are working hard to bring the site back up as soon as possible. We appreciate your patience and, again, we apologize for the inconvenience. If you need further assistance, please call us at 1-866-636-3079.”

Despite my strong disagreement with their decision to agree to Warner’s 28-day window for renting new DVDs, Netflix remains a company that seems to handle customer service exceptionally well (unlike others). Check out this internal presentation too; great stuff.

[thanks Jeff]

The web has no shortage of URL shorteners. In fact, there are so many that they’re all kind of blending together and I have no idea where to turn beyond the de-facto one Twitter uses, Bit.ly. But today, a new one has piqued my interest.

ShadyURL (made by Wonder-Tonic) is awesome because well, it creates shady URLs. Rather than focusing on making a URL as tiny as possible to spread on a site like Twitter, ShadyURL takes a regular web address and converts it into something that looks as sinister as possible.

For example, techcrunch.com becomes:

http://5z8.info/dicksonparade_k5f1f_hackwebcam

Facebook.com becomes:

http://5z8.info/myspace-of-sex_n2

Today HBO announced it will be making its movies and TV Shows available on the Web to subscribers through HBO Go, which up until now has been in private beta. HBO Go is part of the cable industry’s TV Everywhere strategy to make TV content available online to paying subscribers. It contains 600 hours of movies and TV shows which can be streamed live and even in HD. HBO Go is available first to Verizon FIOS subscribers. Since I am a Verizon FIOS customer, I logged into HBO Go this morning and checked it out. Below are my initial impressions and screenshots.

The videos play decently and you can watch in HD, but if I wasn’t already paying for HBO I certainly wouldn’t pay for access to this site. The choice of shows and movies is just not that great. You can watch every episode of The Wire, and the current season of The Sopranos, but not one episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. You get a lot more in your cable subscription, especially if you get multiple HBO channels. The on-demand option is great, but essentially HBO Go is competing with much broader array of choices on the TV which can also be made on-demand through a DVR. There are some movies like The Watchmen and Taken, which I think I’ve already seen three times each this month on TV, and a spattering of older archived movies like Canadian Bacon, but for the most part the selection is worse than what you get on Netflix via its streaming option. I’m not sure I want to see The Chumscrubber in HD.

The site itself is well-designed, image heavy with lots of entry points. You are greeted with a slideshow view of ten shows and movies on heavy rotation, including the movie Taken, HBO Series Big Love and The Wire, and a Dennis Miller special. If you have HBO, you can’t really avoid any of these shows, so nothing special there except that you can stream it anywhere on your laptop. Tabs across the top allow you to explore deeper into movies, series, comedy, sports, documentaries, and “late night” (aka, HBO’s hard-hitting sex documentary series like Real Sex).

For each series, you can choose any episode for at least one season, but some shows are missing. You can also create a watchlist to watch shows later. When I was clicking through the site, the streaming quality was great, but when I tried to switch to another show or movie the audio to Canadian Bacon kept playing in the background.

WWIV, Wildcat, Celerity — these hallowed names represent the best of a golden era of communication, back when “getting online” meant tying up the family phone line, remembering arcane Hayes AT codes to maximize performance out of the 9600 baud modem your dad borrowed from work, and TradeWars was the best multiplayer game available. Yes, I’m talking about Bulletin Board Systems, originally text based and later augmented with ANSI graphics. The first public BBS celebrated its birthday yesterday, and I think it’s a fair bet that few of us would be engaging in discussion today if it weren’t for that simple little computer bulletin board in 1978. Why even our esteemed leader John Biggs ran a bulletin board system for a brief while!

I met a lot of really interesting people, and learned a lot of interesting things, as a result of my participation in BBSes around town. I never got into CompuServe or AOL or Prodigy — they were too corporate for me. I was more interested in the smaller BBSes hosted by people with interests similar to my own: science fiction and fantasy, the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and role playing games. I attended a couple of parties, picnics, and other social events coordinated by BBS users. Because the community of users was smaller — and local — there wasn’t nearly the prevalence of trolling or anonymous flamewars. BBSes were a great way to connect, and communicate, with people.

Of course, it was a simpler time back then. We weren’t bombarded with advertisements. There was no Flash animation. Heck, even downloading a low-resolution image of a pretty girl in a bikini took upwards of 20 minutes! There were no hyperlinks, no embedded images or videos: it was all text based, so there was a very real value to careful explication. The depth and breadth of discussion was often greater, with more personal insight and contribution (and sometimes BS). Generally we all knew one another, and welcomed new participants pretty quickly.

BBSes exist in stark contrast to today’s web, where the regular participants on many big blogs drown out newcomers, the audience’s fixation on neophilia and the John Gabriel Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory prevail, and a pithy image or silly video can trump even the most erudite discussion.

Thanks Wired for the trip down memory lane!

Aurora Feint started out as a puzzle game developer for the iPhone platform but has since evolved into the maker of a comprehensive social gaming platform dubbed OpenFeint that continues to attract independent iPhone game developers to join its rapidly growing community. Today, the startup is launching the private beta of OpenFeint X, which offers indie developers the ability to create Zynga-like free-to-play games including microtransactions and virtual goods.

With the success of Zynga and PlayFish on Facebook, Aurora Feint wants to help create more of these types of free-to-play games on the iPhone. Launched with Japanese investment partner and mobile gaming company DeNa Group, OpenFeint X will be rolled out to the general public in phases over the next few months. With the international investment in the project, we can assume that OpenFeint X is designed to develop games that appeal to global markets as well.

Using the new platform, developers can create games with a chat wall where players can interact with each other, a newsfeed showing recent in-game activity, and game nudges. And OpenFeint X’s premium services allows developers to use a cloud-based infrastructure to build and run a full virtual goods store, access detailed analytics, and include game-specific currency wallet.

The existing OpenFeint platform is quite popular amongst developers and already powers social gaming services for 12 million users and is growing at a monthly pace of 25 percent. The strategy of trying to develop Facebook-like free-to-play games through Open Feint isn’t surprising. Peter Relan, executive chairman of Aurora Feint, also happens to be the executive chairman of CrowdStar, a social game developer on Facebook, which makes develops Happy Aquarium, Happy Island and Happy Pets.

Startup PBWorks, which was formerly known as PBwiki, specializes in helping businesses, non-profits, and educational institutions collaborate via wikis. The startup has been steadily adding real-time features to its platform over the past year, most recently integrating Twitter-like microblogging, tapping into the real-time stream and adding a template store. Today, PBworks is adding another collaborative feature: PBVoice, which is click-to-call conferencing from within the platform.

The platform, which received, an overhaul of its user interface and features last year, offers businesses a project management application and a customized wiki workspace, with mobile support, document management, access controls and more. Now, users can make a conference call from within the platform by simply clicking the names of the desired participants. Unlike most conferencing calls, there’s no dial-in number; PBVoice will call all the participants. Users can add new participants at any time, and each conference call is recorded and stored for later use and review. You can also send the recording of the call to any participants.

The beauty of the integration is that the conference calling feature is an extension of the collaboration platform. Users can call anyone with a single click who already has a PBworks profile or manually dial in any number. PBworks Voice runs on the open source FreeSWITCH telephony platform and phone systems are hosted in PBworks’ own datacenter.

For now calling is limited to the U.S. and Canada but the startup plans to enable international calls in the future. PBworks is launching a free beta period of the service today which is capped at 200 minutes for the next month. When the beta finishes, all PBworks paid subscriptions will automatically come with 200 minutes per month. For nationwide calls, 300 min per user per month will cost $5 per user. 2000 minutes for nationwide calling will amount to $20 per user per month.

Currently, PBworks manages 1 million hosted workspaces with over 3 million active users and has accumulated a loyal client base. The company serves teams from many of the Fortune 500, and was home to three presidential campaigns, the United Nations, The Financial Times and Harvard University. Like Salesforce, PBworks is a paid subscription service, with no advertising. The company has raised nearly $2.5 million in funding, with its most recent funding round of $2.1 million announced in 2007. Competitors include Microsoft Sharepoint, Jive, and Socialtext.

Yes, it’s perfectly possible to watch Hulu from outside the United States if you know how to hide your location, but there are millions of people who don’t who would love to get access to the streaming service. For them, there’s now TVGorge, a recently launched Flash streaming site that’s still in ‘infant stages’ but has a lot to offer already.

Million dollar question is: is it legal?

According to its website, TVGorge using searching and indexing techniques to detect and gather content from third-party TV streaming websites around the world. The company says that its proprietary script is capable of detecting the best source for TV shows and automatically compile the information for its database. Each video is said to be manually screened to make sure it is of high quality and functioning properly.

TVGorge adds that it does not effectively store video files on its own servers and only links to or embeds existing videos from a ‘variety of sources’. Listed at the bottom of the homepage are partners such as CBS’ TV.com, Hulu, TVGuide.com and TVDuck.

The amount – and quality – of the content on TVGorge is nothing short of impressive: all episodes from all eight seasons of 24 are on there, for instance, in addition to dozens of episodes of shows like Californication, 30 Rock, Heroes, Lost, CSI, Mad Men, Grey’s Anatomy, The Simpsons, and so on. I counted 128 TV shows on the site.

In its Terms and Conditions, TVGorge claims to fully respect the intellectual property rights of third parties, but somehow I doubt the company effectively has agreements with Hulu, CBS and others regarding the international distribution of its copyrighted video content in place.

Something tells me this one won’t be around for long.

(Via Twitter and Download Squad)