What starts as a weird love letter to Apple ends as a keen examination of its chances of success in the one place it still hasn’t conquered: your living room. A rather long piece in today’s Times looks at whether or not Apple’e latest scheme to release movies on the same day and date as their DVD release will have any sort of specific effect on sales of Apple TV, and any general… → Read More
You’ll soon be able to join the ranks of happy XP owners and download SP3 online. If you don’t want to wait for the updater to pick it up you can apparently download it here as well. It might be a horrible virus called Vista, though, so be afraid. Just kidding. → Read More
Hey what’s another box underneath your TV, right? Especially when it’s got movies streaming directly from Movielink and Blockbuster, yeah? According to Reuters, Blockbuster “is developing a set-top device for streaming films directly to TV sets and is expected to announce the offering sometime this month.” So we’ll have another Vudu-like hardware box just for movies… → Read More
Apparently tomorrow’s the big day. The first service pack for Windows Vista will be available for manual download on the Windows Update and Microsoft Downloads sites. It’ll also be pushed out as an automatic update on April 18th for those users who can stand another month of random crashes, slow system performance, and the inability to reliably connect to secure networks. I’ll… → Read More
[photopress:usenethow.jpg,full,center] If and when the **AA have Usenet shut down after the piece appears, feel free to blame Biggs. He’s making me write it. I occasionally mention Usenet when talking about piracy here, but I’ve never really explained what it is or what it does. I’m still not going to explain what it is, technically, (that’s what Wikipedia’s for), but… → Read More
[photopress:idolitunes.jpg,full,center] Aren’t American Idol ratings way down this year? That’s what the Drudge headlines read, I think. That might explain why you’ll soon be able to download Idol performances on iTunes. The show’s creators/rpducers/hangers-on have cut a deal with Apple that will put on iTunes audio of the 24 semifinalists on iTunes and video+audio of the… → Read More
Oh Pleo, you’re the best almost-real dinosaur friend a guy and/or gal could ever have. Just in time for St. Valentine’s Day comes a new behavior download for your Pleo pet. He coos, he flirts, he slices and dices! From the PleoWorld.com website, Has Pleo been bitten by the love bug? He sulks when left alone, but pet him … he wiggles, coos, and sighs happily. Cuddle Pleo and his… → Read More
Amazon.com will reportedly purchase digital audiobook provider Audible.com in the second quarter of this year for $300 million. Smart, smart, smart. The purchase will allow Amazon to offer up Audbile’s 80,000+ audio programs (mostly books, newspapers, and certain radio programs) for download to its digital content customers. Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader has an audio jack that would… → Read More
[photopress:mattyroxxx.jpg,full,right]Artists whose songs are used in Guitar Hero and Rock Band get royalties from the sales of the games, and the games have sold like insane nutty crazy. In fact, revenue from both games in 2007 surpassed that of actual musical digital download revenues, which was the largest growing sector of sales for the music industry. In other words, more money was generated… → Read More
[photopress:qqtrax.jpg,full,center] Qtrax, ostensibly the first free and legal P2P service, went live yesterday to all sorts of questions. If there record labels didn’t sign any deals with the service, whose music would it be serving? Why would it make such a hullabaloo about its launch if the man behind the curtain was asleep? Will the source code for its main software component be… → Read More
[photopress:qtraxqs.jpg,full,center] There’s some controversy regarding the music industry’s latest band aid, Qtrax, which is touted as the world’s first free and legal P2P service. The idea is you’ll put up with a limited number of ads on the Qtrax Web site and that you’ll tolerate the software “phoning home,” giving the company information like play… → Read More
[photopress:bfhgfw.jpg,full,right] Electronics Arts will release Battlefield Heroes this summer, its first free-to-play game in the West. (There’s already a version of Fifa in Korea that’s free) The game, which looks a lot like Team Fortress 2, is from the same guys who developed Battlefield 1942. It will be only be available as a download and won’t cost you a dime. Instead, EA… → Read More
Oh, Wal-Mart. We love your low prices, your imported-from-China everything, but when it comes to online movie purchases, it seems you misstepped. Your HP-powered online movie store that launchedin February was supposed to, as Peter Ha might say, “change the game.” Only it didn’t; the game is the same. For HP, the brains behind the operation pulled the plug on the underlying… → Read More
So now that Warner Music is on Amazon, I thought it might be a good idea to give their download service a whirl. I’m a Mac man, so these screenshots are all OS X. However, the process should be the same for Windows. → Read More
Let’s say Santa tomorrow brings you Lost on Blu-ray or maybe a Simpsons or Seinfeld boxset or two. By all means, enjoy your new gifts, but don’t forget that the men and women who wrote the stories for those shows—”writers”—are royally screwed over and see very little money as a result of their sale. Yes, the writers strike is still unresolved and even though… → Read More
Which Zune are you? The one no one bought? Hey, guy with the Zune. All of the tech blogs are posting this in hopes that you’ll see it and download it. It’s basically a Zune diagnostics tool to fix USB and wireless sync problems. I know you don’t have a computer, but just in case you get one, this will help you out a lot. If you see the guy who bought the Mylo, tell him… → Read More
I wish my Wii could download movies and television shows. It can’t…yet. That might change soon or it might change later or it might not change at all. Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aime isn’t sure yet. He’s still too busy trying to produce enough consoles to meet demand. After that’s taken care of, he says that his company will begin to explore other channel… → Read More
French pirates—not the Spanish Main kind, but the ones using BitTorrent to download movies and such—may see their Internet connection terminated if The Man finds them downloading illegally. A proposal that’s fully endorsed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy (and drawn up by the head of French entertainment executive) would see pirates cut off from the Internet after getting… → Read More
Say hello to the source of the MPAA’s next ulcer. It’s ZML.com, a site with similar ultra-simplicity and low, low pricing to former heavyweight music champ Allofmp3.com. The site offers movies in varying levels of quality, with the lower resolution movies starting at $1.99 and the highest resolution movies (DVD-quality) topping out at $4.99. If it sounds too good to be true, it… → Read More
Jeez, and you thought Steve Jobs was bad tempered. NBC Universal president Jeff Zucker recently explained why the company told Apple/iTunes to fly a kite. If you guessed greed as being a major factor, well then you have a pulse because that’s what everyone thought. “We wanted to take one show, it didn’t matter which one it was, and experiment and sell it for $2.99. We made that offer for… → Read More
The RIAA has now set its sights on Usenet, that decentralized network of discussion groups, some of which happen to host copyrighted material. The cartel filed suit against http://www.usenet.com, a Usenet access provider, for offering—get this—”essentially the same functionality” as the Groksters of the world. (When was the last time anyone used Grokster? Why don’t we… → Read More
The pay-whatever-you-want Radiohead album is now available for download. “In Rainbows,” the band’s 10-track, seventh studio album is the first high-profile “name your price” release of an album. You can download it now from the band’s Web site (or, by the time this gets posted, your local file sharing hub) or wait till December to buy a hard copy of the album… → Read More
I know this is off-topic, but bear with me. For Xmas last year, my little brother gave me an iTunes gift card. I’d actually not used it yet, and I just ran across it in a drawer. Since we’re talking about music and iTunes today, I figured I’d let you guys pick out my new music. See, I need something new. I’ve had the same 400 or so songs on my iPod for about three months… → Read More
Not that you’ve ever paid a single cent for anything Google has given you, but just so you know, Google is going to stop selling videos via Google Video. On Wednesday, August 15th, Google will stop selling download-to-rent and to-own videos. It makes sense now that it owns YouTube and has a real means of making cash of videos. I’d say leave the content distribution to Apple and Joost. → Read More
Some music fans will rejoice as they flip open their AT&T phones this morning. AT&T is now offering DRM-free tracks from eMusic in MP3 format, meaning for once, you can actually download tracks on your phone and eventually transfer them to your PC. In addition to the non-DRM goodness, you’ll also find the largest selection of music downloads offered by a mobile carrier with over 2.7… → Read More
Sony today released the best Playstation (One) game available to mankind on the PSN store. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night can be had for the extremely low price of just $9.99. If you’ve never played this game, your credibility as a video gamer just got shot down. You play as Alucard, Dracula’s son, hellbent on destroying your father’s castle, etc. The game is massive… → Read More
Another setback for the RIAA, another win for the Slashdot crowd. A federal judge ruled that the music industry racket cannot demand discovery ex parte while determining the identity of “music thieves” at the College of William and Mary. This is partly because the judge felt the RIAA was citing the wrong law in its suit. In English that means the RIAA isn’t entitled to the… → Read More
One of the most popular BitTorrent clients for Windows, uTorrent, is slowly making its way to Mac OS X. After BitTorrent Inc. bought the company, it promised that OS X and Linux versions would be coming soon. TorrentFreak got his hands on an OS X copy and for a beta version, it looks pretty good. It has the ease and look of Mac OS X, yet the power of Azereus and uTorrent for Windows. Compared to… → Read More
Like our very own Peter Ha pointed out, do we really need a USA Today article to tell us that U.S. Internet speeds are terrible? According to a report conducted by the Communications Workers of America, U.S. Internet speeds are “pathetic” compared to the rest of the world. Right now, the median U.S. download speed is 1.97 megabits per second; Japan’s is 61 megabits per second… → Read More
The start of a DRM-free music revolution has arrived. Well, maybe not a revolution, but at least a new version of iTunes. Version 7.2 brings a new feature called “iTunes Plus” to the table. Purchasing a song with iTunes Plus enabled allows you to purchase DRM-free, 256Kbps AAC tracks from the iTMS. You can set it on or off in your iTunes preferences. Excited? Ease up, Tiger. iTunes… → Read More
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