TVedia Media Center

The end of DRM or the end of iTunes?

2006-07-20T15:50:00.000-07:00

Engadget reports that Yahoo is experimenting selling Jessica Simpon single without DRM. The single named "A Public Affair" costs $1.99, which is $1.00 more than music in other music stores, such is iTunes. However, the song is customized; buyer can choose a name embedded in the song. The name list doesn't contain every name on www.babynames.com but it is indeed an interesting marketing gimick. Yahoo blog insists that the price difference has nothing to do with the absence of DRM, but is because of the personalized feature mentioned above. However, it's quite suspicious that they are simply using it as a smoke screen to experiment with the new paradigm of online music sales.

The publicity generated along with a small but vocal group of anit-DRM users' willingness to support such endeavor will likely fuel the sales of this single, not to say that it's a bad song to start with. It's a very smart move on Yahoo's part, because they don't own any DRM infrastructure; they don't own a one-two punch like Apple's iTunes+iPod. They have every reason to innovate in this field and change the status quo.

Once proven popular, RIAA's assertion of the effect of music privacy will become weakened, and more and more artists and labels will be less fearful and come on board to do similar deals with online music stores. After all, they want to sell as many copies of music as possible. This will forever change the dynamics of online music sales and possibly influence the still burgeoning online video sales. Apple's dominance in this field will be diminished because they are forced to compete iTunes and iPod separately with their respective competitors in the market. They will not be the only one that enjoys the ability to provide tight integrated user experience to end users. Because of the increased competition, price of the music will be lowered to a level more comfortable to most buyers, and more formats, including loseless formats will likely appear as some kind of added bonus from online music stores.

Don't you love the fast pace in this world of digital entertainment? We are on the brink of observing DRM becoming a blip in the history.

YouTube on your tube

2006-07-19T14:12:00.000-07:00

The popularity of YouTube has reached the world of media center PCs. eHomeUpgrade reports that a MCE plugin called YouTubeMCE is available for Windows Media Center edition. However, users of TVedia have been enjoying YouTube videos since the TVedia 4 beta. As matter of fact, it also includes online videos from Google Video, Metacafe, Grouper, and DivX.com. Because Microsoft's MCE's plugin architecture is kind of restrictive, the creator of YouTubeMCE has to resort to HTML hosting, and embed the online videos on the HTML pages, the performance of the plugin suffers, and the user experience is kind of crappy. On the other hand, TVedia's XML+JavaScript plugin architecture allows the videos and thumbnails to be displayed as native user interface elements, coupled with TVedia's asynchronous user interface architecture, accessing online content has never been easier. TVedia users can also zoom the video easily with the remote control. You know how pixelated these online videos can be when zoomed full screen. TVedia by default restricts the zoom level to 200% by pixel count, but you can always zoom in more manually. The animated zoom effect is pretty cool by itself.

TVedia 4 Media Center is released

2006-07-19T12:20:00.000-07:00

8 Dimensions has released the much anticipated TVedia 4 Media Center software. http://www.8dim.com/default.asp?linkid=b