Archive for December, 2006

Why pay for an inferior product?

Published by
silent
at December 12, 2006 in Media. 0 

Yahoo! Music Chief Dave Goldberg thoughts of the usage of digital rights management (DRM) holding back the music industry heard at the start of the year – Music 2.0 conference in LA is slowly starting to gain support (comments). At the same Music 2.0 conference, Ted Cohen, EMI’s the top digital music guru noted several times that DRM is necessary to moving legal downloads forward. (”The DRM makes the business model possible,” he said. “Without DRM, you can’t have the business models and give people choices.”) Give people choices? Who is he trying to kid? Even with our current technological advancement, ‘legal’ digital music is no where near as convenient as ‘illegal digital music’. For the price of inconvenience by ‘legal’ digital music – an extra cost for the less than ideal DRM solution.

Fast forward during the year 2006, Yahoo! Music after the mildly success of a personalized version of the Jessica Simpson single A Public Affair and Jessie McCartney’s album Right Where You Want Me will team up with EMI’s Blue Note to ‘test’ MP3 sales of Norah Jones’ new single Thinking About You. Ted Cohen, formerly EMI’s digital guru and now independent digital media consultant is singing a different tune. Ted Cohen now believes that the Jones’ test was “a nice first step”, but said the company hadn’t gone far enough. Funny how much a year can change for a guru!

At which point I wonder have Music Record Labels, Solutions Providers, DRM Providers or Digital Music Retailers ever thought of the end user. What is important to the end user? What are end users looking for? With the end goal/objective in mind, what have the Music Record Labels, Solutions Providers, DRM Providers or Digital Music Retailers done? Are they working together?

To be honest, I have not fully appreciate the reasons why people would pay for ‘legitimate music’. Why would I spent any money to purchase a clearly inferior product. At some point, my purchased music will either fail me in four accounts: -

A) Devices -

  • If I purchased my music via iTunes, I won’t be able to play it in Microsoft’s Zune. I might owned an iPod today but my music now ‘restricts’ my choice of purchase.
  • If I purchased my music via a mobile device – under the current widely used OMA 1.0, I will not have the ability to transfer my music to PC. My music now ‘restricts’ where I can play the purchased music (on a memory-limited and currently imperfect device for listening to music might). What if I were to upgrade my phone (and I do, every year… I lose my music). There are DRM solutions which meet the above specific needs (i.e. SIM bound), but now, I’m ‘restricted’ to that particular DRM solution.

B) Format -

  • A lesser problem than say audio visual… but there are no standardized format currently, OGG, MP3, aac, aacPlus, enhanced aacPlus, WMA etc.

C) Location & Time -

  • We live in a global world now – moving constantly with often short-notices. I can no longer afford to purchase and keep a 200 CD collection (or worse, tapes!). What will I do, now that I’m in Beijing for an unconfirmed period of time… or like my buddy in the Netherlands, who for the last 2 years have moved every 6 months to a new country. Yet the music we have are precious, and provokes memories/emotions.

To cap off, MuSMo was founded to cater our needs first… clearly none of the above comments are NEW, but we will boldly step forward to suggest our thoughts on how we can all contribute to a more complete music experience.

3G World Congress & Mobility MarketPlace 2006 and ITU Telecom World 2006

Published by
KwangErn Liew
at December 12, 2006 in General. 0 

It is quite a surprise that both these events are happening at the same time in Hong Kong. They seem a bit too desperate to draw tourists to this destination. But seriously, it’s the best to have both 3G World Congress & Mobility MarketPlace 2006 and ITU Telecom World 2006 to be in the same place! Reaping both sides of the best worlds of meeting people, networking, and also experiencing the future of technology.It is to my surprise that the adoptation of media streaming is slow in Japan. The reason that I’ve gathered seems to be mainly due to the implementations of the 3G network in mobile phones. According to the representatives of NTT DoCoMo, there are less than 200,000 subscribers on mobile tv and music streaming. It is in a way acceptable due to the lack of mobile handsets that are compatible. May well be only for DoCoMo, but realise this, DoCoMo is the predominant mobile operator in Japan. They are releasing more handset models by next year, so I think we should be expecting at least a conservative 20% increase per month, that’ll be nice. Access, a software mobile provider, affirms that Japan has not been adopting very well with mobile media simply because of the lack of applications and providers. Strange isn’t it? For me it is. I would have expected Japan to have been doing very well with media mobility at least a year ago.

Interestingly, South Korea has been doing very well. With over 3 million subscribers within a year, they are pushing very strongly forward with a range of mobile tv devices, including a USB antenna which you can use for your laptop or PC. Reason? The Government is backing it all up – Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute. I think I’ve spent the most time with them overall, discussing about the future and its technical aspects of technology. I hope to keep in close contact with ETRI because we believe they can play a key role for MuSMo’s success, which is great.

Talking to the people at the exhibition really opened up my eyes further as to the direction to which MuSMo should go. It confirms our ideas and thoughts, as well as putting things in a realistic direction. However, there’s still one major obstacle ahead of us, which is the development of the core web application. I have yet to find anyone who would work closely with me on this gigantic project.