Posts Tagged with ‘iTunes’

Joss Whedon and company weren't prepared for the enormous interest in his created-for-the-Web musical Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, which premiered Act I Tuesday online and crashed the servers almost immediately. The online-only musical features several Web 2.0 in-jokes, such as the villain, Dr. Horrible, having a vlog, then being thwarted by police and the superhero Captain Hammer after revealing his plans for a freeze ray on the vlog.
Conceived during the recent writers' strike, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog came with the [...]

Up until now, having a movie night with friends or family meant that everybody had to get together at someone's house and gather in front of the television (or visiting a local movie theater). Now however, using it's patent-pending SimulStream technology, Lycos Cinema (when was the last time you heard anything from Lycos?!) introduces a web-based service that lets multiple users view the same movie or TV episode while socializing at the same time with [...]

Streamzy is a newly launched service, founded by 21-year olds Jesse Chemtob and Brian Krantz, which is best described as a streaming media search engine. It gives users the ability to search for music (video will be added soon) which can be streamed live on the web and, for registered users, saved among a playlist to be accessed from any computer via the internet.
Streamzy is powered by the Seeqpod media search engine and, therefore, all of its features are [...]

You would have thought that companies involved in selling digital media (especially those with DRM content) would have learned a lesson after the fiasco Google went through when the company decided to close its video marketplace. That was last August, when Google abruptly cut off access to the videos that many customers had rightfully purchased or rented. Then, after heavy internet criticism, all customers received an apology and full refunds.
Schizophrenic Microsoft must not have heard about that news story however, [...]

By now everyone is familiar with the RIAA and their collective belief that everyone online is a thief, stealing music every which way we can. The recording industry has been fighting to prove that even the premise of “making available,” putting music out there to share with no proof it's ever been downloaded, is still a violation of copyright laws, and that all the digital sharing results in nothing but losses for the music industry.
The Web 2.0 music sites beg [...]

Just little more than a month ago I reported on how Apple's iTunes music service has passed up Best Buy to become the number two music retailer just under Wal-Mart.
Not surprisingly, Ars Technica has reported today that the latest NPD MusicWatch Survey for the month of January has shown Apple making a significant stride in passing Wal-Mart to now become the top music retailer in the nation.
The stats from the NPD Group show that the iTunes music [...]

Since last November, Comcast's efforts to free up valuable bandwidth among its users by banning and preventing access to BitTorrent traffic has proved about as successful as the RIAA reign of terror on the realm of P2P sharing.
BitTorrent is here to stay and, judging from the outcome of the Napster drama from as far back as 1999, fighting the progression of such a popular protocol will only result in wasted dollars and an eventual service allowing legal file sharing for [...]

Is it the end of old media as we know it?* R.E.M. has a new album dropping 1 April, but for those of us already using iLike with iTunes or our Facebook or MySpace accounts, we are in luck; 11 tracks from the album will be available for streaming and sharing a week from today (Monday, 24 March), one week before the album's release date.
R.E.M.'s release may be the highest profile use of digital distribution yet, and the surest sign [...]

I will never understand how VCs make their decisions. Some companies that get funding seem doomed to fail, and falling under that very confusing category is last week's news that doubleTwist was funded by Index Ventures.
In theory, doubleTwist has all the Web 2.0 buzzwords that should lead to success. It's tagline is “liberate your media” and the only text other than news on their entry page is “doubleTwist desktop enables you to easily share media with friends and sync with [...]