On the heels of Google wading into the music streaming waters with its Google Play Music All Access service, with a $10 fee for all-you-can-eat streamed tracks, the indie music agency Merlin has today published results of a recent survey of its 20,000-label member group, plus an analysis of 6.5 billion music streams over the last year, which spell out where the money is coming from today. → Read More
Shazam and Rdio have offered something wonderful for U.S. users as of fall 2012, providing full track streaming for tagged music via Rdio, thanks to a “Listen Free on Rdio” link within the Shazam app. That means that once you use either the free or paid version of Shazam to identify a song from your device, you can then listen to the entire track, so long as you’re either an Rdio subscriber or… → Read More
Major League Baseball has always been very strict about its content appearing on YouTube and other video streaming sites. Peruse YouTube for highlights from your favorite players and teams, and you’ll find it nearly impossible to find quality footage. As soon as a clip from a game goes up on YouTube, it’s taken down. Up until now, it’s just a collection of slideshows and footage uploaded from… → Read More
Music streaming service Spotify has finally come to Asia. Today, it announced that it would be launching in the cities of Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Its premium service, priced at $9.99 per month in the US, will also be a little cheaper in the region, with Malaysians getting the lowest price. Update: after turning on Asia, Spotify posted on its blog that it now has also turned on services… → Read More
Apple is said to be getting very close to nailing down streaming licensing agreements with Universal Music Group and Warner Music, according to sources speaking to The Verge. The report follows news from the NY Post that claimed Apple was well under where labels were expecting in terms of its streaming rates, and now says that Apple’s service will pay fees pretty much on par with those paid by… → Read More
Roku just announced via its blog that it has sold 5 million of its streaming Internet media players since its launch back in 2008. The devices have managed to stream a total of 8 billion pieces of content in that time, impressive for a device that started out as essentially a dedicated Netflix box. Roku recently introduced its third-generation hardware to market with the Roku 3, which went on sale… → Read More
Vdio, a video streaming service created to complement the Rdio music service, is today making its first public, live appearance. The site — offering not all-you-can consume subscriptions but pay-per-view films and TV shows, with an emphasis on new releases — is opening for previews in the U.S. and UK, with $25/£20 gift certificates going out to people who are already subscribers to Rdio’s… → Read More
The land grab for online music streaming services continues. On the heels of reports that Spotify is planning to take its web-based music player global to complement its desktop and mobile apps, competitor Rdio is extending its own browser-based music-streaming service to seven more markets. Today, the company — founded and backed in 2010 by Skype/Kazaa/Joost co-founder Janus Friis — announced… → Read More
Another move today from Amazon that speaks to its growing presence in content delivery and enterprise services, done at competition-beating prices: today the company launched Elastic Transcoder, a new service that lets people upload digital video and put it into formats — h264, AAC and mp4 for now — that are usable on devices like smartphones and tablets, as well as PCs. Amazon hopes to lure in… → Read More
Another day, another content licensing agreement in the online streaming space. Amazon-owned LOVEFiLM, a European Netflix competitor, has signed a new streaming deal with NBCUniversal International TV Distribution to further bolster its catalogue of content. LOVEFilm subscribers will now be able to enjoy on-demand access to “hundreds” of episodes of U.S. TV series. → Read More
Today at the official first-day keynote of CES 2013, CEA President and CEO Gary Shapiro introduced a group of Hollywood studio executives to announce a new partnership between UltraViolet, the digital movie locker service designed to help move movie sales to a multi-device future, and TV and Blu-ray player manufacturers. Warner Home Video President Ron Sanders also shared some stats on the… → Read More
HBO today has won a battle in the over-the-top content wars. The pay-TV giant has inked a deal with Universal Pictures that extends Universal Pictures’ and Focus Features’ films appearing on HBO’s TV, online and mobile platforms in the U.S. for the next decade. What’s key is that the deal is exclusive to HBO and will mean that Netflix (and other OTT players) will not get that… → Read More
Redbox Instant by Verizon, the up-and-coming joint venture that’s preparing to take on Netflix, is now live in Google Play. The service won’t be publicly launching until early 2013, according to a recent report from The Hollywood Reporter, however. But Redbox recently told GigaOm that a beta test would begin in December – and, apparently, it’s beginning today. → Read More
Pandora has fully launched in Australia and New Zealand, the only two places outside of the U.S. where the service is available in its entirety, with the addition of mobile access via iOS and Android apps today. Previously, the service was available in a limited form in both countries thanks to a web-only access trial, but now smartphone users can get in on the action. → Read More
Poznan, Poland-based startup Zapstreak has just brought its AirPlay-style media streaming solution for Android out of beta, making the SDK it provides available to developers worldwide after a six-month extended testing period. The company’s tech allows Android developers to build music, video or picture-streaming right into their app. But will new options change Zapstreak’s chances at success? → Read More
Verizon updated its FiOS Mobile application for iPad, which now streams 75 channels of live TV. Unlike some of the mobile experiences Verizon has released in the past, the new application doesn’t require you to install software on your Mac or PC to act as the intermediary – instead, everything streams directly from the Verizon router in your home. → Read More
LiveU, a provider of video transmission technology that works over cellular and WiFi networks, and is used by media companies (including TechCrunch, but also the BBC and NBC) that need to record and transmit video on the go, has raised another $27 million in funding. This round was led by new investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, and also included participation from existing investors Canaan… → Read More
Cloud gaming may have taken a hit with the floundering of OnLive, but Agawi is still going strong and today, the Menlo Park company is officially launching its GameZen app for Windows 8. We previewed that partnership back in September, before Windows 8 had even launched, when executive chairman Peter Relan talked about how his service differs from the competition. Now, the app is live, and Relan… → Read More
I love streaming music and I’m an avid user of Spotify for this purpose. I was pretty delighted when I saw that Taylor Swift’s new album “Red” was available for listening when I opened up the app. I listened to the whole album, and I gotta tell ya…it’s pretty damn good. But then something happened, it dissapeared. And then it came back. Then went away again.
Apparently, Taylor Swift doesn’t… → Read More
7digital is one of the oldest players in the digital music industry. The London-based company announced today that it has raised $10 million from two public technology companies. Even though the company is already profitable, it plans to expand its open platform strategy to power even more music services. 7digital is the key element behind Samsung’s Music Hub or the upcoming BlackBerry 10 App… → Read More
The Wi-Fi Alliance has launched a device certification program for the new Miracast wireless streaming standard which aims to simplify video and audio sharing between different devices — doing away with the need to connect to a router and also for devices to be made by the same manufacturer in order to stream content between them. → Read More
When it comes to music discovery, technology and the Internet opened a lot of possibilities. Yet, and this is what Serendip is all about, music curation by your friends or knowledgeable people are frequently much more valuable than what you could get from an automated service. Today, Serendip is launching out of private beta and is now available for everyone.
The service aggregates all the… → Read More
Add one more distribution partner to Spotify’s list as it seeks more scale for its music streaming service to make it more profitable: Deutsche Telekom, owners of T-Mobile, says that beginning in October, it will be making 18 million tracks from Spotify available to its 35.4 million customers in Germany, with the data usage associated with the streaming not counting against subscribers’ data… → Read More
Amazon continues to ramp up the content in its Amazon Prime film catalog to draw users to the premium service, with the latest licensing acquisition expanding its back catalog of sports and documentary content. From today, users of Amazon Prime Instant Video, its on-demand streamed film service, can watch instalments of ESPN’s 30 for 30 popular series of sports documentaries including The U, Pony… → Read More
Google, as you might expect, has massive amounts of data and it’s built many tools to handle it. Stuff like MapReduce and GoogleFS, which spawned the open source Apache Hadoop, and BigTable, which spawned Apache HBase.
But Google didn’t stop with those projects. It’s continued to create new big data tools and continues to publish papers about them. Dremel (PDF) is designed to make querying the… → Read More
If part of the game in streaming music is to have the biggest catalog of tracks, then today Rdio made a significant move to turn its volume up to Spotify levels, and gain some street cred with indie fans in the process: it announced two key deals with CD Baby and TuneCore, both independent music aggregators, that ramps up its total track number to 18 million songs, and adds some 250,000 new… → Read More
The neverending patent wars keep on raging, and Spotify is the latest to get targeted in the social media skirmishes. The music streaming company is getting sued by Nonend Inventions, a Dutch company, which claims Spotify is infringing on five of its U.S. patents covering streaming media, peer-to-peer search, and retrieval and playback techniques. Nonend says altogether it holds more than 40… → Read More
Amazon Prime members who like to rock an iPad, not the Kindle Fire, now have access to Amazon’s ever-growing collection of movies and TV with today’s launch of the Amazon Instant Video app, which just popped up this morning in the App Store for iPad. As with the desktop and Kindle tablet version, the app allows users to watch videos for free, but only if they’re already a paying member of Amazon… → Read More
We’ve been pretty outspoken about NBC’s coverage of the Olympics. From what looked like a good start full of social media promise, the broadcaster has failed to deliver the most crucial element of all: a large, unfettered river of live sports content from the event itself, available to anyone, not just cable subscribers (coverage here, here, and here). It’s been getting a lot of grief on… → Read More
Netflix has just released its second quarter 2012 earnings report, in which the video rental veteran outpaced estimates, improving on last quarter and meeting most expectations and even beating some. Revenue increased to $889 million compared to the same period for 2011. Earnings per share came in at $0.11 per share. In the weeks leading up to the release, analysts had been projected Netflix to… → Read More
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