snapshot 3/7/08

Why Doesn’t Best Buy Sell Creative?
Back in Q4 or 2007 Creative players diminished from Best Buy’s store shelves and finally disappeared. It was left to mere speculations of low profit margins, the need to push their in-house brand, and Creative’s own lack of enthusiasm. None are the case.

Best Buy launched its digital music store powered by Rhapsody not too long ago. They asked manufactures to be Rhapsody certified, similar to being PlaysForSure certified, so that all players will fall into one of three music services: Best Buy Music Store (Rhapsody), Zune Marketplace, or iTunes. Creative failed to comply with the request and was thus dropped from Best Buy retailers.


Live from the Middle East: the Pussycat Dolls, via MySpace
MySpace, streaming encoder provider Kulabyte, and network systems provider Akamai will pool their resources for "Operation MySpace," a new initiative that will offer streaming webcasts of concerts in high-definition live Kuwait. Operation MySpace will stream the performances live to as many people in the world who choose to see it, using Kulabyte technology to encode the video and Akamai technology to deliver the content to MySpace. A satellite will pick up the feed live from Kuwait, send it to a link on the East Coast, direct it to another satellite, and it will arrive to MySpace servers located in Los Angeles.


HP’s BookPrep could be springboard for book sites
One of the more interesting technologies that Hewlett-Packard showed off at its research event yesterday was HP BookPrep. This service essentially enables consumers to track down and buy any book — even those that have been out of print for years.

Amazon.com could start selling those books to anyone who can find them. Amazon already has more than 1.2 million books for sale. But Reddy says there are 6.5 million books out of copyright, roughly 32 million more in a kind of legal gray zone, and a total of 90 million that are completely out of print.



Trans World Revenue Drops 23% in Q4
The old way of selling CDs looks to be dying faster than overall CD sales. Trans World's fourth quarter revenue dropped a whopping 23% and 2007 sales revenue dropped 14% (read press release and 8-K, which has a transcript of the conference call). Net loss for fiscal 2007 was $99.4 million. Comp store sales dropped 8% on the year. In the conference call, President and COO Jim Litwak said Trans World's comp store music sales dropped 28% in Q4, the top 50 titles 35% in Q4 and the top 50 video titles were down 12%. For the year, comp store music sales dropped 23%.