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Posts Tagged ‘Streaming Service’

Lights Go Out For Streamy, Founders Flock To Facebook And Zynga

Alas, personalized news streaming service / social network aggregator Streamy hasn’t been able to find a buyer willing to pay what the two founders were hoping to get for the assets, so the startup is shutting its awesome Web app down – for now.

In a short notice posted online, Streamy says it plans to “hold” the service and “reinvent it when the time is right”. In the meantime, however, both co-founders of the fledgling company have been forced to go out and look for a slightly steadier job. One has landed at social gaming juggernaut Zynga, the other at social networking juggernaut Facebook.

CEO Don Mosites, for one, is heading to Zynga to work on a “new, special project”. He won’t tell me what it is, but he promises it will be “big”. To be continued, I suppose.

The other co-founder of Streamy, Jonathan Gray, will be joining David Recordon (previously with Six Apart) and Monica Keller (previously with MySpace) and become part of the social networking giant’s open source division.

From what I can gather, Gray will be helping Facebook promote the adoption of projects like HipHop, Cassandra, Tornado, Thrift, and others. He’ll also continue working with HBase, which was the Hadoop-driven data back-end for Streamy.

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Let The Credits Roll (In), Netflix Is Down

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]

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Apple buys music streamer Lala, but what’s it getting?

Last week’s rumors have become this weekend’s facts, as various sources are confirming a possible deal we discussed on Friday: Apple has purchased the music streaming service Lala. Right now, Apple’s iTunes dominates the US music download sales, and does very well in many overseas markets, but the company has so far refused to experiment with any delivery model other than downloads. That will almost inevitably change, but the purchase of Lala isn’t necessarily a sign that “inevitably” means “soon.”

The case for this meaning that Apple is ready to start streaming was made by an unnamed source in a Reuters report, who told the news service that, “Apple recognizes that the model is going to evolve into a streaming one and this could probably propel iTunes to the next level.” As our original report noted, Apple has also been rumored to be testing a streaming service for video content; adding music to the menu seems like an obvious choice.

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Lala bought by Apple, streaming iTunes Store around the bend?

Filed under: Apple Corporate, iTunes, Apple, Music

Earlier today, Greg Sandoval at CNET reported that Apple was in talks to buy out music-streaming service Lala; his piece suggested that these talks were in advanced stages, and a deal could happen at any time — Apple just needed to sign on the dotted line.

As of this evening, Sandoval’s rumor is looking a lot more like a done deal. The Wall Street Journal and the NY Times are both confirming that Apple has pulled the trigger and spent a miniscule fraction of those billions in cash on Lala. No numbers were announced, but the WSJ notes that an investment of $20 million in Lala from Warner Music Group was written down by more than 50% earlier this year.

Why Lala for Apple? The AP noted that Lala co-founder Bill Nguyen demoed an iPhone app in October that allowed ‘intelligently cached’ songs to be streamed to your iPhone, with the recently-streamed songs replayable even outside of cell coverage areas; Wired suggests that Lala’s bundle-payment setup, where users buy stream credits, could save Apple’s iTunes Store millions in credit card fulfillment charges. The deal is expected to put Nguyen and the Lala engineers on Apple’s payroll, although the Times notes that Lala’s agreements with the labels to stream music are non-transferable.

Lala’s model for music streaming is an interesting one; the service scans your hard drive for songs you already own and lets you stream them at will, taking the concept Apple’s also providing with Home Share to the Web (other services also let you share media between iTunes instances). You can also choose to stream songs you don’t already own for $0.10 a piece, and ‘upgrade’ to a downloadable version at will.

Lala also recently made an agreement with Google to offer music previews in Google searches, greatly expanding Lala’s reach. It’s not clear whether Apple’s purchase will have any affect on that arrangement

Is this a streaming service you would like to see come to iTunes? Leave a comment below and let us know!

TUAWLala bought by Apple, streaming iTunes Store around the bend? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 04 Dec 2009 22:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If Apple Acquires Lala: 3 Models for Service Integration

If the rumors are true, then something is afoot in the Apple music camp. According to a recent article in Bloomberg, Apple is in talks to acquire online music service Lala. If a sale is finalized between the two companies, a number of new music monetization models can emerge and with Apple holding the supply chain from devices to players to downloads, a streaming music component may prove devastating to others.

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Tiered Pricing: With a Lala purchase, Apple could easily employ a tiered pricing model for a streaming service. Users would continue to purchase streams on a per-song basis while also having the option to download songs through the iTunes store.

Full Subscription: In contrast to this model, Apple could also follow MOG’s lead and launch a full subscription service with links to purchase Apple downloads.

Full Subscription with Download Limit: And finally, different still, there’s the opportunity to employ Microsoft’s Zune Pass model. The company could offer a $15 dollar per month subscription streaming music service with the option for users to download their ten favorite songs per month to keep. If Apple decided on this route, downloads would still prove lucrative as users in excess of their download limits would be driven to iTunes for additional sales.

Discuss

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Apple looking to buy Lala, get into streaming music?

There’s no deal yet, but Bloomberg and All Things Digital are reporting “confirmed” buyouts talks between Apple and music-streaming service Lala. If it goes down, the deal would potentially bring free music streaming to Apple’s iTunes empire, but we’re assuming Steve’s less interested in integrating Lala’s current service than he is in its talent, back-end technology, and content licensing deals. We’ll see where this all goes — or if it even happens.

Apple looking to buy Lala, get into streaming music? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remains Of Streamzy Picked Up, Reborn As Web Radio Service Listen.fm

Frustrated with the fact that Pandora does not provide its streaming service in Canada, Vancouver-based Jeff Anderson set out to build a community-driven Internet radio service of his own along with other music fanatics, and dubbed the project Listen.fm.

Currently still in private beta, Listen.fm is not going to be a ‘revolutionary’ service, says Anderson, but rather just a great place to listen to and discover new music that can legally be shared with others. The site has been in the works for nearly a year and should be launching in public beta some time next year.

As you may recall, Streamzy, a media search startup that used the late Seeqpod’s database as a content source but became a shell after Seeqpod folded, was recently put up for sale on eBay.

Anderson took notice of the sale, and picked up whatever was left of the project in a rush to see if some of the technology could be used to enhance Listen.fm. Turns out there wasn’t much left at all (the Seeqpod API didn’t work anymore and the YouTube API didn’t provide much benefit to what they were building either) although Anderson says they don’t regret ‘acquiring’ the Streamzy leftovers because it allowed them to play around with the backend, Google Apps Engine, in a working context.

Not that Streamzy cost him and his team a fortune: the auction closed at $2,700.

More on Listen.fm when they are closer to launching.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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Clicker Media launches a programming guide for Internet TV

Video web site Clicker Media is formally launching its service today which gives online users a real TV Guide-style search engine for television content online. The goal is to give users access to a massive playlist of TV to watch on the web.

The Los Angeles-based company indexes all available video online, from Netflix movies TV shows to Amazon film downloads. There are more than 400,000 episodes indexed online, all available as legal content. It lets you discover what’s available to watch and where to view it on the web. The site draws from 1,200 sources and categorizes shows into 1,200 areas.

There are 30,000 movies available fro Netflix’s Instant Streaming service and Amazon’s Video on Demand service. It also catalogs more than 50,000 songs from 20,000 artists. If you want to share film lists or other info, you can do so via the site’s integration with Facebook Connect.

Users can use it much like Tivo for the Internet. They can queue shows to watch, get season passes, and get alerts when new episodes show up online. The company is headed by Jim Lanzone, former chief executive of Ask. He says that the idea is that there is so much available on the web now, you have to have an easy way to search it.

The service has been in private beta testing since mid-September. Fans can make their own comments and upload their own content. You can search for topics within a specific program. For instance, you can look for “Bill Gates” appearances on the Charlie Rose show. The index will also suggest shows based on what you’ve watched.

The company was founded in January and it raised $8 million in a first round from Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures. Blake Krikorian, founder of Sling Media, has joined the company’s board of directors. Rivals include Hulu.com and Blinkx.

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