David Emery Online

Busy Day

30 May 2007

Some days I find it really hard to write, as nothing has really happened. Admittedly, I have a suspicion that these probably turn out to by my better posts, as I actually have to do a bit of thinking, but never mind…

Today is not one of those days, anyway.

So, lets start – as always – with Apple; today they finally released iTunes 7.2, and along with it iTunes Plus which is Apple’s fancy-pants marketing name for DRM free tracks on iTunes. So, for those playing along at home, mark the date – 30th May 2007 is officially the day DRM died.

Good riddance and all that.

The details of the implementation aren’t all that interesting: basically, you now get to choose whether you want to see iTunes Plus tracks or normal tracks, and there’s also an option to “Upgrade” your already purchased tracks. I had a whopping 5 tracks, which cost me an equally whopping £0.90 to upgrade. That’s really about it – nothing too radical here.

I’m still particularly impressed – purely on a marketing front – with the simultaneous move to 256kbps tracks as well as no DRM. Whoever thought of that idea should get a nice meaty bonus come Christmas time; it means that Apple is able to market these songs as both an upgrade and superior choice, and allows them to charge more for them, all while managing to shirk the problem of pointing out that DRM’d tracks are somehow inferior to non DRM’d tracks. Without that, they would have a had a major problem trying to market the new DRMless tracks: “yeah, they’re better in some way you probably don’t understand – but don’t let that stop you buying the rest of our DRM’d catalogue!”.

Bravo!

Not content with just launching the new iTunes functionality, though, they’ve also just a couple of updates for the Apple TV as well. The first – a high-end model with a 160gb disk – is quite thoroughly dull, to be honest, but the second is quite interesting: they’re releasing a free update that will add YouTube support.

This is interesting for a few reasons; it shows that the Google-Apple partnership stuff wasn’t just talk – they really mean it! Secondly, it shows that they’re not worried about competition between their TV/movies download service and free services like YouTube – and they should be as I can see ad-based free services winning out in the end. Thirdly, they weren’t joking when they said they’d role out new features for free to Apple TV owners – and this is a very nice free feature. Finally – and most importantly – YouTube now has an decent delivery system onto your TV, which could open up all sorts of possibilities (especially when they start getting more premium content on their network).

Ok, next up some sad news from the Web 2.0 battlefield: Last.fm has been bought by CBS. I can’t help but think that Last.fm – like Facebook – really didn’t need to be bought; they could have held out and got a lot more out of the service in the long run.

This is, of course, one of the major perils of being backed by venture capital – the VCs are there for the big payday, not for the slow triumph; I would imagine that Last.fm probably had very little choice in the sale, depending on the details on their term sheets. I can only hope that CBS are going to leave them alone, because by the very nature of what Last.fm does – aggregating people’s music tastes – if the userbase gets a sniff of the corporate overlords they’ll be out of there quicker then you can say iLike.

To round out the days news first thing this morning – trying to get the jump on Apple, I guess – Microsoft announced “Surface”. You know that video that was floating around over a year ago, featuring a funky multi-touch large screen display where you could manipulate all sorts of things, like photos and videos.

Microsoft Surface is just a rip off of that.

Not even slightly different – it’s the same in almost every way.

And it only costs $10,000.

It really infuriates me sometimes; I really don’t like to pick on people or companies, but for gods sake Microsoft – you make it so hard not to. This is just a incredibly blatant attempt to draw some attention away from the iPhone, which uses similar technology (Apple bought the company behind the linked video) but costs $499.

Microsoft, if you want to win this game you really must try harder.