AOL has relaunched AOL Radio, with live streams from 140 CBS-owned radio stations from around the country in addition to hundreds of web-only channels. That includes a handful of talk radio stations and dozens of music stations. But more importantly, the CBS deal could help AOL bring in local advertising deals, which could be a vital component in making AOL Radio profitable.
The New York Times reports that Arbitron rating show that AOL Radio has a larger weekly audience than any other web radio service. But the cost of providing the bandwidth for radio streams and paying royalties for the rights to stream the music is high, and the company has yet to turn a profit from its online radio efforts.
The deal with CBS replaces a similar partnership AOL had with XM Satellite Radio.
The new AOL Radio Player also features support for Safari, preset buttons and support for pausing radio streams and skipping some songs.
Redlasso is a database stuffed with the latest TV and radio programming, allowing registered users to search for and "lasso" out clips in order to imbed them on other sites. "Virtually all media" (TV, Radio, streaming internet programming, podcasts) is indexed in almost real-time, says the Redlasso site.
Although the company swears it is negotiating deals with several content partners, it received a cease-and-desist letter from three major TV networks on Monday. They accuse Redlasso of creating a "business based on the unauthorized syndication of" others' content. Though it doesn't seem to be enough, Redlasso monitors all member accounts (to make sure no one's watching extended amounts of programming) to ease the minds of content owners.
The service is intended solely for bloggers and other web publishers. As a result, expect some type of application process when requesting an account. As for us, we're waiting on our acceptance emails. The service is free, but it is currently in closed beta, meaning its unavailable to the general public.
We spend a lot of time in front of our computers. But when we finally step away, you know what we like to do? Relax with a good book. No, just kidding! We download digital media from our computers and enjoy it on the go. With that in mind, today we're starting an occasional series bringing you reviews of some of our favorite audio and video podcasts.
We're going to try to avoid the big names at the top of the iTunes charts and bring you some of the more obscure podcasts we think are worth listening to. But that doesn't mean we won't don't love us some Science Friday from NPR or Diggnation. It just means that you're probably already well aware of them. We'd rather tell you about the Naked Scientists, Digital Planet, and Love & Radio.
If you have suggestions for podcasts you think we should check out, let us know in the comments. And stay tuned for our first irregularly scheduled review.
Fancy Last.fm? Fancy Windows Mobile? Then you'd probably fancy the Last.fm Windows Mobile app currently in development, which happens to be called Last.fm Mobile. The Pocket PC version includes scrobbling and experimental radio functionality, but the Smartphone version can only scrobble from Windows Media Player.
The app has a healthy backing of supporters at the Last.fm forum, which is where you can learn where to download and how to install Last.fm Mobile. You'll need Windows Mobile 5 or 6 and the .NET Compact Framework 2.0, which should be included with Windows Mobile 6.
Last.fm offers tools for discovering new music, social networking, and, of course, listening to music. The addition of WM functionality only makes it that much more useful.
As Google and Verizon are locked in a tiff over the way 700 MHz radio spectrum is licensed by the Federal Communications Commission, it looks less and less likely that we're going to see the forthcoming Google Phone at wireless retail stores when it finally hits the market. Google contends that the licensee of the radio spectrum should be forced to sell "unlocked" devices, therefore permitting open applications on their network, a move which would certainly benefit Google and other powers whose bread and butter is mainly software.
Verizon, on the other hand, argues that they don't need to make unlocked phones available, since it's possible to get unlocked phones from other sources. Google's response? Big carrier retail sells 95% of the phones in North America, so arguably less than 5% of available phones are unlocked and open. Google, of course, isn't accustomed to having access to just 5% of the market these days. Nevertheless, the spectrum license reads as follows (quoted from Google's public policy blog):
"[Licensee] shall not deny, limit, or restrict the ability of their customers to use the devices and applications of their choice."
It's a clash of business models. Verizon makes money by selling applications they control. Google makes money by giving applications away and monetizing the mindshare they gain by doing so. Wireless is a wild frontier for somebody like Google, because the power brokers in the cellular industry don't want to compete with new players from other spaces, like a search engine company.
Bottom line, it doesn't look like the Google Phone is going to be on Verizon's store shelves, and something tells me Google isn't about to start a retail chain of its own.
If you broke your alarm clock because it made you mad yesterday, so you ended its pathetic life, or even if you didn't, you might consider waking up to an online alarm clock at Klokoo.com. You might even say the Klokoo improves on the traditional alarm clock by offering new and different options to wake up to, including an adequately obnoxious rooster crowing, that classic alarm bip-bip sound, and your choice of hip-hop, rock, trance, and "french songs."
Besides your choice of music, you can also enter an rss feed (hopefully www.downloadsquad.com/rss.xml) to be displayed so that when you come to and scramble to your computer to turn off the alarm, or turn it up, you'll have the day's fresh news sitting there waiting for you.
Perhaps a few features would make this idea even better, including a multiple-feed rss reader, nothing fancy, but a way to get news from several sources, as well as the ability to enter your own internet radio station URL to be played upon wake-up would be especially helpful. The design isn't complete, and it is a work in progress, but it is an interesting approach to the age old problem of being awake. Coupled with enough strong coffee, you're on your way!
What better way for the geek to greet the world than use the web? Watch out for the trance station, that is almost more soothing than "wake-up" material, but to each their own.
There are untold fortunes to me made in this world, as long as you live by one cardinal rule: never underestimate the laziness of consumers. This is the guiding logic behind a new "intuitive" mp3 player launched by the Slacker Company. Slacker and their new gadget called... The Slacker (creative, no?) are set to be available in June and cost around $150 for a 2 Gig model, and $400 for 12 Gigs. The real innovation is that the player chooses music automatically, and allows you to decide if you like it or not. If you say you don't, it'll never play the song again. Many internet radio users will be familiar with this format. Mainly because it's taken directly from internet radio. Slacker's internet radio has been operating since March, and has 100 stations which will is where the songs for the mp3 player will be downloaded from.
In a wonderful testament to just how lazy we've become as a society, one of the founders of Slacker was quoted as saying "Most MP3 players are too much work for the average user." Valid point. Many of us lay tired and sore in our beds at night after a long day of handling our Mp3 players. Medical experts have recently reported a high rate of chronic fatigue among young Americans and feel that portable music players are to blame, even going so far as to dub the trend "Ipod Drain". Poor attempts at humor aside, the Slacker does seem like a useful tool. A portable radio with just enough control over the playlist that you can be sure to get something you like, while trimming out that which you don't. And more importantly, now that we don't have to spend so much time and effort slaving away on our old fashioned MP3 players, we as a society can finally get around to getting some work done.
Google has recently taking the advertising industry by storm, from its recent announcement of the purchase of DoubleClick, to its Google Audio Ads, they're making the competition and the world know they are serious about providing advertising through a variety of channels and mediums.
Google has made an announcement that they will be working with Clear Channel in a multi year agreement to sell radio advertising. This new agreement will see inventory on more than 675 Clear Channel Radio Stations become available to Google advertisers through Google Audio Ads. Google will sell the inventory of 30 second ads for Clear Channels AM/FM stations through a national distribution agreement that will enable Google's advertisers who had previously been unable to try out the radio medium a chance to see what its capabilities.
Google and Clear Channel also have an additional online advertising partnership which sees Google as the provider of text ads to Clear's radio-station web sites.
Pandora is a music discovery service we've covered before. It goes beyond "regular" internet radios, who largely base their taxonomy and discovery services on rather flat databases and sterile genre/artist/album nomenclature. At best, you might get web-based social suggestions, like what built MySpace and makes Virb sing. Pandora utilizes the research and ongoing classifications of the Music Genome Project to suggest songs similar to the ones you already enjoy.
The Music Genome project is a story in itself, but Pandora uses real, live musicians to dissect songs and analyze their pieces and parts, organizing that data in such a way that, frankly, makes it a little scary to use Pandora regularly. Once you "seed" a radio station with an artist (something you can try on their homepage for free without even registering), subsequent songs are based on the style of that original artist (and the random song chosen by Pandora from said artist). You can give a simple thumbs up or down to indicate your song preferences as each new song plays.
A provision in the DMCA allows Pandora to play these songs, almost every released song out there. They really make an effort to grab the long tail and most of their songs, once you start just listening, are not well-known. You can't rewind or even go back, due to the restrictions of the DMCA, but you can order the songs from Amazon or iTunes as you listen. All together, Pandora is a remarkable service for a "simple" internet radio service.
But a ruling from an obscure, 3-person panel from the Library of Congress threatens the existence of Pandora, and every other internet radio service out there. The plan from the Copyright Royalty Board is to increase the fees to internet radio operators so high that they will effectively be out of business. Paying $.0008 a song might not sound much, but if you consider the millions of songs per day served up by Pandora alone, it becomes a very large bill indeed.
There is an appeals process, and those threatened are taking action. However, it might require legislative action. Ultimately it is puzzling why the RIAA (proponents of the onerous charges) would threaten a nascent industry in such a way. What's to gain? Web radio has no doubt spurred online music purchases, much as the radio generated (and continues to generate) wads of dough for the music biz.
We sat down with Tim Westergren, the man behind the Genome Project, and the founder of Pandora. In our interview, Tim explains the basic situation, and where some logic might prevail (we hope).
I'm not sure how I missed this when it came out, as I'm a big fan of both eMusic and Pandora. It seems that Jon Strunk, a product manager at eMusic, has created a terrific Pandora/eMusic mashup.
All the details can be found on Jon's blog, but the service works as you'd expect. While Pandora plays tracks, eMusic offers them up for download (if they're available). Because I have both Pandora and eMusic accounts, when I first visited the mashup I was auto-magically signed in to both services and my default station started playing. Genius.
Social music site Last.fm has recently updated their OS X client to version 1.1.0. While the site is short on details for the new version, there are some fairly obvious UI changes that include new icons, font changes and button sizes. This beta version is only compatible with Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger).
I've been using it all day today, and I'm happy to report that it hasn't crashed yet. This is good news, as the previous version (1.0) would frequently decide to stop working on my MacBook Pro. As Last.fm user sandymcc points out, the ability to play multiple tags at the same time seems to have disappeared. For those of you who have updated, what changes have you discovered?
A couple weeks back the folks at Pandora just held a town-hall meeting in Denver to discuss Pandora's history, future, and the things Pandora is planning to do to bring you customized music-listening to you everywhere you go. What is Pandora? If you haven't heard, Pandora is like an online radio station, but not only that, Pandora helps you find related music based on what artist or song you give it. Pandora creates stations out of your tastes then allows you to tweak the collection of music for that station by thumbing a song up or down. Pandora is really an incredible piece of software that according to Tim Westergren (our town-hall speaker and Pandora founder & CEO) has two main objectives: The first one is to help all those starving musicians get their music to the masses in a way that will help would-be fans find great new stuff. The second is to cater to music listener's unique tastes by giving them a customizable listening experience, and did I mention it is FREE for the taking? For music fans, casual listeners and even audiophiles, Pandora is the thing to be rocking out to on the net. For those who haven't seen Pandora, check out this video for a taste, and then get on over to Pandora for goodness' sake!
The mechanism that runs Pandora's uncanny magic, the Music Genome Project, is a very complex one that requires almost 400 different "genomes" (scores) per song to be assigned by well-educated music professors and musicians who listen to the song carefully to determine its musical genome or very specific DNA. This process is complicated, and requires these music experts to have a lot of training before they can even use Pandora's rating system. This idea of pulling these somewhat ethereal musical attributes (call it meta-information if you like) right out of a recording by listening to it is a great one, and Pandora works well because of it.
Many companies have licensed Pandora's unique "Music Genome" data to better the recommendations on their own music sites, which says something for its high quality. Tim says that though Pandora does much of this today to pay the bills, their focus really is on the artist and the listener, prompting them to take more steps toward getting the music out there for people to listen to, and making it easier for artists to find a voice. Tim gave us some vague details of the things Pandora may or may not be planning, but time frames and even the likelihood of some of these things may be up for grabs. Here are some ideas you might see Pandora putting to good use in next few years:
We knew the advent of a Google AdSense audio version was coming down the pipes when Google acquired dMarc Broadcasting, a digital media solutions firm. Well, it looks as though AdSense for audio is slated for release this quarter. With podcasts being its main target, and streaming and audio on demand programming. This could potentially bring a whole new level of importance, and validity as somewhat of a business revenue model to the fine art of podcasting. There are also rumors that point to Google launching a music podcast product. Don't you just love Google potential product leaks?
cWell this morning while browsing the forums at QUsers.com I saw a posting on a product called Live Baseball Browser and that it would be released for the Motorola Q soon. I checked out the site for the application and they already had it listed for the Q. I downloaded the Smart Phone version from the site and during the install reading the license agreement, I noticed that the registration fee is for the calendar year and that a new registration will have to be bought each year. I went on installing the trial version anyways to test it out.
After install I ran the application, and after another agreeing to terms confirmation screen, you get a screen with options to choose the date, and the games on that day. In addition to the date and game you can also choose whether to play radio or TV, and what team's broadcasts you want to listen to (if available). On the Q, the interface is a little different than the one shown to the right, from the ivanx.com site, which must be showing the Pocket PC interface.
After making your selections it asks if you have a streaming media subscription at the MLB.com website, which you need to fully use the application. If you click "no" it then asks if you want to try a free sample game. It asks if you want a radio stream or a TV stream. I selected a radio stream, and the audio stream in the built in window media player was not too bad.
After my brief review it seems to be a fairly streamlined interface to get to what you want. I don't know if I would actually stream audio or video of games unless I was sitting with my phone plugged in so I didn't drain the battery quickly. And if that was the case, where I was somewhere I could plugin the phone to charge I would probably be somewhere where I could watch or listen another way. But if you already have the MLB streaming subscription and think you might stream the games I would say this would be a great way to get to the streams quicker than navigating the regular website from whatever mobile device you are using.
There are untold fortunes to me made in this world, as long as you live by one cardinal rule: never underestimate the laziness of consumers. This is the guiding logic behind a new "intuitive" mp3 player launched by the Slacker Company. Slacker and their new gadget called... The Slacker (creative, no?) are set to be available in June and cost around $150 for a 2 Gig model, and $400 for 12 Gigs. The real innovation is that the player chooses music automatically, and allows you to decide if you like it or not. If you say you don't, it'll never play the song again. Many internet radio users will be familiar with this format. Mainly because it's taken directly from internet radio. 
I'm not sure how I missed this when it came out, as I'm a big fan of both 
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