On the heels of Apple’s big dog-and-pony show on Tuesday, Microsoft announced (but isn’t making available) its Zune product, a clear shot across the bow of Apple’s seemingly unshakeable iPod. In a move that seems savvy, Microsoft is pushing the Zune as a “connection” device — the word “connection” in either singular or plural form appears eight times in the press release announcing Zune.
To be sure, the Zune has a lot of features going for it including 30 GB of disk capacity, built-in FM, music, pictures and, yes, video playback. (For more on Zune’s features, see Engadget.) The best part, however, is the built-in Wi-Fi. And this is integral to the connections component.
Zune will enable wireless sharing of music. Songs downloaded from the Zune Marketplace, an iTunes rival that will offer both subscriptions and per-track sales, can be played on a friend’s Zune for up to three days. Moreover, every Zune will come preloaded with music selections from a group of record companies including DTS, EMI Music’s Astralwerks Records and Virgin Records, Ninja Tune, Playlouderecordings, Quango Music Group, Sub Pop Records, and V2/Artemis Records.
But Microsoft is not hyping the video component of Zune, even though it has a three-inch LCD video screen and is capable of playing video. Staci Kramer has an interview with Microsoft VP Brian Lee and he confirms that video is not a focus. The idea, he claims, is “to celebrate music.”
No word yet on the price of the device. Just as Apple announced a beta version of its iTV gizmo, which won’t be available for another six months or so, Microsoft is announcing that the Zune will be available “this holiday season” but isn’t shipping the units to store shelves right away.
Apple and Microsoft are clearly locked in a perception battle and Microsoft has definitely just upped its “cool” quotient a bit. (However, note to Microsoft: drop the brown colored Zune model…you will anyway). Apple is on the defensive now because it has market share to lose — the Zune, if it takes off, will clearly come at the iPod’s expense.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:55 PM | Print | Comments (2)
Reuters’ Yinka Adegoke got a hold of the transcript from an off-the-record session held Tuesday at Merrill Lynch’s investment conference during which Universal Music’s CEO Doug Morris accused YouTube and MySpace of being copyright infringers.
Morris thinks that these hit web sites are illegally using the company’s copyrighted music and hinted that the world’s largest record company will soon take legal action.
“The poster child for (user-generated media) sites are MySpace and YouTube,” said Morris, according to a transcript obtained by Reuters. “We believe these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars.”
He added, “How we deal with these companies will be revealed shortly.”
In a research note, Merrill analyst Jessica Reif-Cohen said that Universal may be the first company to challenge the role of music in social networking and user-generated content. She wrote
“This could be the first salvo from a content player against business models based on user-generated content, much of which relies on copyrighted material.”
In a bit of disingenious posturing, Morris told the investment conference attendees that MTV “built a multibillion-dollar company on our (music)…for virtually nothing. We learned a hard lesson.” Umm…let’s see, MTV put Universal artists’ on TV at practically no cost to the record company, boosting sales and propelling the music industry to new heights. Where was the hard lesson in that?
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:40 AM | Print | Comments (0)It’s been almost ten years since Microsoft threw its hat into the interactive TV software ring and still the Redmond giant can’t get it right. I’ve been following Microsoft’s efforts to sell an interactive TV platform since the get-go, when it aimed to be the middleware provider for advanced set-top boxes that the cable industry had been contemplating in the mid-1990s.
Back then, all I heard from cable engineers was how bad the software was — the original prototype that Microsoft circulated to cable CTOs didn’t have a TV tuner and even included a library of printer fonts. Now, it seems, Microsoft can’t make its software work on Verizon’s set-tops either.
The WSJ’s Dionne Searcey and Robert Guth have this piece today about how Verizon has had to step in and actually write software code to get the Microsoft TV Foundation (the company’s most basic software) to work on its FiOS TV boxes. It seems that key components of the technology were too bulky for the Motorola boxes Verizon is using. In order to make its deadlines, Verizon had to send its own engineers to fix the code.
Verizon isn’t the only U.S. telco to use Microsoft software — AT&T is deploying a different version of its middleware app in its Project Lightspeed roll-outs. But, as I suggested over a year ago, AT&T’s TV deployments, which have been delayed a couple of times, are also bedeviled by Microsoft’s technology.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:17 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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