Online retailer Amazon.com Inc said on Tuesday that it will sell NBC Universal television shows on its Unbox digital video download service. The companies are offering a variety of packages for the shows, including a discount of up to 30 percent when customers buy a full season's worth of shows. New shows will be available the day after they run on television, the companies said.
Garth Firsts Continue Piling Up
Apparently, Garth Brooks is not yet finished with finding new ways to be the first. This week his “More Than A Memory” crashed through the R&R Chart to arrive with 36.3 million impressions making it the first artist to ever open at No. 1 on the Country chart. According to Wade Jessen, Nashville Director of Charts & Operations “‘Memory’ opens at a record-high No. 4 on the Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems most-played tally. The single, which arrived at radio on Aug. 20, amassed 4,349 plays.
Can Music Big-Timers Fix Sagging Sales?
After a particularly anemic year that saw double-digit declines in album sales and no true blockbuster CDs, the recording industry is looking to its fall releases to deliver some much needed multiplatinum magic. There's reason for some hope, as the acts expected to release CDs before year's end have in the past delivered more sales phenomenons than flops: Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, Rascal Flatts, Carrie Underwood and even Britney Spears. And next week, the fall season begins with what is being hyped as an epic sales battle, with Kanye West and 50 Cent (and Kenny Chesney) putting out CDs on the same day.
Microsoft slashes Zune pricing ahead of Apple iPod event
Hours before Apple Inc. is expected to introduce new iPods at a special event in San Francisco, rival Microsoft Corp. has announced that it is dropping the retail price of its 30GB Zune music player to $200.
"It's part of the normal product lifecycle, something we’ve had on the books for months," wrote Microsoft's Cesar Menendez. "We just got some research back and customer satisfaction with the 30GB device is really high (around 94 percent) and we expect even more consumers will now want to discover the Zune experience at the new lower price."
Apple's iPod Classic Is Overgrown, Hard-Drive Equipped Nano
Apple just introduced the iPod Classic, a revamped version of the standard clickwheel iPod. An 80GB model (30 hours audio, 5 hours video on the battery) will cost $249. A 160GB version which is thicker than the 80GB Classic but still thinner that the 5th-gen 80, will cost $349. It holds 40,000 songs and can run 40 hours of audio on battery (7 hours of video). It will have the same user interface as the new iPod nano.
iPod nano Shape-Shifts Into Next Generation
The next iPod nano made its debut appearance at the Moscone Center in San Francisco this morning, bringing along video playback features and a slimmer, wider form factor that was surprisingly close to the obligatory mockups that heralded its arrival.
Slimmed down, its wide 2" screen is built for video, and at 320x240 pixels, it's the highest-density screen ever produced by Apple. It still looks small enough to deserve the name "nano," easily pocketable but with a screen that takes up a larger portion of its overall facade. It'll also be available in more colors, including black, dark red, silver, light blue, light green, and the red one will be part of Project Red. According to Steve Jobs, the video-playin' pocket players are going to be $149 for the 4GB model (only available in silver) and $199 for the 8GB version. Jobs said they'll be in stores by this weekend.
Downloads on the rise
The Western Europe and U.S. markets for movie downloads will be worth a total of $1.3 billion in 2011, according to a Screen Digest report. "Online Movie Strategies: Competitive Review and Market Outlook" predicts that the movie download biz, both rental and retail, will annually generate $572 million in Western Europe and $720 million in the U.S. by 2011.
An Update On EMI's Digital Album Share
Probably due to selling DRM-free downloads, EMI's digital album market share continues to show an increase since the change in strategy. The company's CD market share dropped a scant 0.2% and the total album share rose only 0.1%. The move away from DRM has allowed EMI to gain market share in single serving digital tracks -- though it's very possible the erosion in that market share would have been worse with DRM.
Jobs: 3 billion songs sold, iTunes is no. 1
Apple's chief executive officer Steve Jobs today told eager attendees of the company's special event in San Francisco that the iTunes Store has sold more than 3 billion songs to date, and that iTunes is the number one music store in all 21 countries served by the Cupertino-based company. Apple has distributed 600 million copies of its iTunes software so far, according to Jobs. "We're pretty amazed at this," Jobs said. "We started with just 200,000 songs, but we have over 6 million songs in every single one of those stores. Millions ahead of anyone else. We've become the number three music retailer in the U.S. -- behind Wal-Mart and Best Buy, ahead of Amazon and Target." The iTunes Store has served up more than 95 million TV shows and 125,000 podcasts. "This is amazing material, it's free, and over 25k are video podcasts," Jobs added.
"This last statistic blew my mind: in the U.S. of all the music releases in 2006, 32 percent were digital-only releases. They weren't released on a CD. Live concerts, independents. Look how far we've come. A third of the music released in this country was digital only," Jobs told a wowed audience. "iTunes is clearly leading the way."
Apple and Starbucks announce music partnership
Apple and Starbucks said Wednesday they have entered into an exclusive partnership that lets customers wirelessly browse, search for, preview, buy and download music from the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store at Starbucks onto their iPod touch, iPhone or PC or Mac running iTunes while at a participating location.
CrunchDeals: 4GB iPhone for $299 on Clearance
Apple’s just unloading what’s left of the now-defunct 4GB models for $299. It’s a pretty sweet way to get in on the iPhone hype for not a lot of dough. Sure, you’ve gotta sign up for that 2-year AT&T plan, but do you know how laid you’ll get showing off your iPhone? Totally. Oh, you need the 8GB model? No problem, man. We’ve got you there, too. It’ll run you another $50, and it’s a refurb, but that’s ok, right?
iTunes WiFi Music Store first hands-on
As you already saw a bit of in our iPod touch hands-on, we got to spend a bit of time with the iTunes WiFi Music Store today. As far as these things go it's appropriately straightforward -- find tracks, buy them, play them on your device without using your PC. Of course, the whole concept kind of flies in the face of Apple's long standing philosophy of keeping your computer (read: your Mac) at the "center of your digital life" now that you can acquire content without using iTunes proper. But does this mean we can look forward to the Apple TV being able to download content directly from the store? Speaking of downloading video -- it's probably worth mentioning you can't download video over WiFi to the touch (and presumably also the iPhone).
Interview with Apple: A Few More iPod Details
- iPod nano regains its bottom headphone jack, as the touch, and old nano, because there are no end caps of plastic. So to keep ports in one place, they put it on the base.
- Why didn't they combine the classic's and the touch's screen? Because a sliver of the market wants massive storage for videos so they don't have to sync, for road trips, for the car.
- iPod touch has a light sensor to autodim the screen.
- iPhone gets the Wi-Fi store in a month.
Seeking a Niche, Companies Try New Web-to-TV Technologies
The technology company behind KylinTV is NeuLion Inc., a Plainview, N.Y., start-up that sells a new streaming-video technology. It enables KylinTV and other companies to deliver programming via the Internet to the TV sets of small but passionate audiences for topics such as Cuban baseball, religious programming and television shows in Africa.
Since videos showed up on the Internet in the late 1990s, technology companies have looked for ways to turn the Web into a new form of distribution for conventional television -- allowing programmers to pipe movies and TV shows directly to consumers without having to go through cable- or satellite-TV middlemen.
High-Speed Video Store in the Living Room
Vudu’s new $400 movie box, to be available at month’s end, has none of those problems. It’s a little black box (about 7 by 9 by 2 inches) that connects to your TV and to the Internet through a high-speed link — and it comes darned close to putting a video store in your house. Its built-in hard drive permits your choice of 5,000 movies to begin playing instantaneously. There’s no computer involved, no waiting and no monthly fee.
There are four really great things about the Vudu box. First, the picture quality is terrific — like a DVD. If you have an HDTV, the box even “upconverts” the picture into pseudo-high definition. Moreover, Vudu will offer movies in true high definition once it finishes negotiating with the movie studios. (Tech note: The Vudu box will play high-def movies through its HDMI connector only — not its component, S-video or composite jacks.)
Second, the remote rocks. Third, you pay by the movie, not by the month. When life gets busy, you don’t pay anything. You can either rent a movie (usually $2 to $4) — you have 24 hours to finish watching it — or you can buy it ($15 to $20), meaning that it stays on your Vudu hard drive forever. Finally, Vudu movies begin playing instantly. There’s nothing to it. Find a movie, either by typing part of its name or by browsing the New Releases, Genres, Staff Favorites or Most Popular lists. Click past the price/confirmation screen. Start watching.
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