Monday, December 12, 2005
Streaming Music & Streaming Videos, Oh My!
Posted by Jason Dunn in "ARTICLE" @ 09:00 AM
"The first event was MP3tunes.com's announcement of Oboe, its music locker service. MP3tunes is one of the companies owned by Michael Robertson, who founded MP3.com back in the Internet boom years and sold it for a ton of money. Robertson, a serial entrepreneur, has Linspire (formerly Lindows) and SIPphone and probably other companies, too, in addition to MP3tunes. Daring and willing to spend money if he has to, Robertson is a force to be reckoned with. The Oboe music locker is a simple concept: For $39.95 per year, you can upload your entire music collection to an MP3tunes server and listen to it anywhere in the world you can get an Internet connection. There are no storage limitations or extra bandwidth fees. The system is legal because the MP3tunes server can only be accessed by you, so it is no different than ripping your CDs on your home PC. Of course, you have to bother to do the uploading, but special software makes that fairly painless if lengthy. Music is encoded at a maximum of 192 kbps, so this isn't really DVD-quality, but I don't generally get along well with the kind of people who can hear the difference, so it doesn't matter to me."
Oboe sounds like a neat concept, although given the lack of always-on 'Net connectivity, I wonder if this idea is ahead of it's time. When I have an EVDO card built into my laptop and unlimited access for $10 a month I'll gladly keep everything up "in the cloud", but until then hard drives are my preferred storage location. What about you?
Oboe sounds like a neat concept, although given the lack of always-on 'Net connectivity, I wonder if this idea is ahead of it's time. When I have an EVDO card built into my laptop and unlimited access for $10 a month I'll gladly keep everything up "in the cloud", but until then hard drives are my preferred storage location. What about you?
