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Dataplay Ready to Launch
geophile writes "Let's see. This is a CD-like, CD-incompatible storage medium with
lower storage capacity than a CD; copying, which is supported by CDs
and permitted by fair-use laws is not possible; and it's more
expensive than a CD. Read about this great idea here." We've done a couple of stories on the Dataplay discs; this one discusses the heavy content controls built-in. MSNBC had an article on Dataplay a few weeks ago that mentions an "education process" needed to get people to re-buy all their old music in a new format.
Quite often when we see things like this, the general consensous is "If it sucks this bad and is this stupid, people will not buy it." Well, I do not have that much faith in the masses. All it takes is one exclusive block-buster album to come out on this format for all the sheep to buy and VOILA, TNBT. So, this will be a good test so see if the public can withstand the crap...
PS- Are there any plus sides??
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
I quit buying CDs years ago due to the RIAA's greedy, grasping control-freak mentality. It will be a cold day in hell before I shell out a single cent to them for some broken incompatible crap like this.
These people live in their own little world - with only the MPAA and some other like-minded morons as neighbors. Small wonder they can get laws like the DMCA passed - Congress lives in the same world.
I just do not foresee people buying these things. Yes, the "public" can be incredibly stupid at times, but they do catch on, eventually, and I think the RIAA's game is up.
Don't throw your computer out the window, throw the Windows out of your computer!
I'd just like to say good luck to the RIAA.
They're really going to need it... because this is truly a bankrupting idea. And after this crap doesn't fly, they'll be charging $30 a CD to recoup costs.
I am sure as hell not going to buy something that is going to get lost in the hole in my jeans pocket... or the dog can easily chwe up and eat.
DivX failed. If this one fails, they will surely try, try again, so long as there are pennies to be squeezed and rights and freedoms to be bought.
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
So compact flash sucks too because it's more expensive than CD's and incompatible? Dataplay discs are VERY small. That's the whole point. They are intended for digital cameras, PDA's and similar small, battery driven devices. Not PC's. Not even laptops.
Instead of focusing on being funny when submitting the article, how about focusing on being clued in?
The discs look like CDs an inch (2.5 centimeters) across and are housed in plastic cartridges.
I'm looking at my Sony Minidisc right now. The Dataplay people are joking. Right?
Syllable : It's an Operating System
I believe this "education process" is misunderstood. What they're refering to is the executives figuring out that being able to control the market through physical media is obsolete. Try to force the market into a new format and you'll just push even more people to the black market.
The music industry's arrogance towards their own customers is incredible. Imagine if Microsoft, Oracle, Symantec, etc. all said that their programs will only install on new computers in MetaData format media and if you had legacy media you'd just have to buy it new. Or they told you they wouldn't honor upgrades unless you bought new licenses by a certain date (oops, beat me to that idea).
I was under the impression that once you owned the rights to the music, you wouldn't have to pay royalties again.
Why can't you just buy music in the new format for $1 a disc, if you already own the music?
eh.. I already know the answer why do I bother
And how long will it be before someone cracks all the "hidden" music on the disks?
Make sure to get your vote cast for Dataplay at fuckedcompany.com.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
a compression like MP3? thats just enough for me NOT to adopt this format. If they use a lossy format, forget it. I like raw PCM used on CD's, or a codec that reconstructs it (like SHN audio). lossy formats suffice for pirating..but do you really want your $18 you shell out going for something that sounds just as good as a mp3 rip of it?
probally if you lick it it will taste like a CD.
As long as this tastes the same, I'll buy it!
________________________________________________
suwain_2
Make a blockbuster hit. 90% of fanbase has no compatible player. Do we a) forsake all that profit or b) release the CD? The music industry don't have all that much of a community feeling, if they can make cash, they will.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Especially if AOL finds some way to put media on them. I want new free stuff to put in the microwave . . .
While I've pretty much stopped buying cds from music row years ago, and now only purchase cd's from local artists (God, I love Austin), who actually see the profits from the cds, I still don't see how its security methods, are gonna prevent me from hooking it (if it actually catches on) to my receiver w/ digital output, and hooking that up to my sound card w/ digital input... How is this keeping me from copying the audio?
I'm only paranoid because everyone is against me...
..rubbish.
This new product is a lame attempt to try and quash the 'music copying' market - amusingly, I couldnt have imagined anyone else to be the 'flagship' artist to launch this product than Britney Spears.. gawd knows I am sick of seeing her on Pepsi Commercials, and now she goes and sells out on somthing like this too.
It sure as hell doesnt make me want to buy one - if I was to buy another portable media player (seeing as I have a car, I sold my MiniDisc player a while back) it would either be one of Sonys new NetMD MiniDisc players, or somthing groovy like an iPod.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
The discs will cost about $16 when they are released in stores in early June, with one album of music ready to play. But because the discs pack data densely and the music is compressed using methods similar to that of MP3 software, each can contain up to five albums of music.
Some music companies will release the discs with hidden extra albums, which can be activated by entering codes bought at their Web sites for $8 to $13.
The extra disc space can contain videos and lyrics, accessed by connecting a Dataplay player to a computer. When connected, a user can also store data on the discs -- 250 megabytes on each side, for a total slightly less than the 650 megabytes that fit on a CD.
Data can only be written to the discs, not erased.
That's Good:
Hey! There's a "secret album" on this disc, and I only have to pay 50-80% of what it would cost to buy that album by itself.
That's Bad:
Hey! All of the "secret albums" are third-rate crap that the record company didn't think they'd be able to sell as standalong albums.
That's Good:
Wow! I can store my own data on the 80% of the storage capacity that's just going to waste.
That's Bad:
Wow! The record company put three crap "secret albums" on this disc...but I still have 20% of the storage capacity for my own stuff.
That's Good:
Cool! I'll put this album that I haven't listened to yet on the free 20% of this disc, so that I can check it out on my way to school.
That's Bad:
Cool! There's one good song on this album, and the rest of it sucks. I guess I'll just listen to the good song a lot, since I can't delete this album from the disc.
* * *
It is a dada story -- it has no moral.
What the submitter fails to mention in all that rhetoric is that these disks are the size of a US quarter, which I find pretty interesting.
All the other crap he spewed may or may not be true. It's hard to tell when it's obvious that he's biased against the device and fails to mention the positive points.
In short, once again the Slashdot editors don't bother to do any editing.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The RIAA thinks this is going to stop piracy? Nobody is going to go out and buy a Dataplay player and have to buy ALL their music over again. The few people that buy this are going to be geeks that hack them and turn them into really high-capacity floppy drives. The RIAA will then think that nobody is buying this crap since they would think the people who do are putting the music on the net. Its going go be awhile until something replaces the Audio-CD as the most ubiquitous format.
Of course, they can simply stop producing CDs to make people convert. Their music they already own, that is.
The RIAA is shooting themselves in the foot (again). Why can't they realize the Internet is THEIR future?
Slashdot is a waste of time. I enjoy wasting time.
Ill stick with my music on my hard drive (MiniDisk for when im on the move). I have everything available on my computer (TV, Radio, Movies, Games, Music, Phone and more). I use MiniDisk for mobility. Why would I want a format that restricts this capability I have today.
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
MD-data failed because sony killed it.
Not because it cost too much.
Even years later with 128MB zip disks.... MD-Data would still have been a better option had the drives been available. Even TODAY they would be a great option.
However, that just means hackers get to go to a new level, modifying hardware, changing the code in the microcontrollers, etc.
I've no doubt that this will go the way of the "DVD Killer Divx", the minidisc, and the DAT (which is used professionally - dataplay won't even have that market).
All of which have Digital Restrictions Management built in. Of course the recording industry is going to go for it. Their SDMI initiative failed (and is still flopping about like a fish looking for water), and there is no way they can control any software/data based approach - too many fingers have to be in the pudding to make it work, and one of those fingers may leak - much like how the DVD decryption routines were discovered (which would have taken longer without the key, but would likely have still taken place)
So their only hope is
- Copyright/patent new format
- Copyright/patent hardware and algorithms
- Only license copyrights/patents to those willing to play ball their way
But the trick is then getting the consumers to pay for this new deal, which initially is going to be very expensive. Given the choice of buying an IPOD and this new disc device, which do you think the average joe is going to get? No little discs to lose, tons of space, no DRM (well, hacked away) , and personal organizer to boot.They'd have to sell millions of these before the price comes down, and like the minidisc it ain't gonna happen.
I suspect that even when they only release a certian artist in that format the music will still be available (one person with player and a nice sound card, or simply ripped off the radio) in an adequate format. It will backfire, because music consumers are fickle and will simply stop listening to an artist if the entrance fee is $300, and the artists are less likely to play ball with companies that use them like pawns to bring about DRM.
It's a complicated chess game, and they are playing like they've lost their queen. They will fail if they don't fold the game and start with a completely different mindset.
So I'm not worried. Besides, CDs will likely be available cheaply for a long, long time.
-Adam
"I just know by being in the business, there's definitely a need for a portable format," he said. "Portable CD players are too big and too bulky." -- see article
*Portable CD Players are mostly used for plugging into your car or listening to in a bus.
*If you really want a cost-effective and small music player, try an MP3 player like the iPod (5GB, rw, $400). Why would a consumer by a read-only, write-protected, $270 dollar, 500Mb device when they could have so much more with an iPod or Rio...much less "bulky" than a CD player too. (provided, you do need a CPU for one, not hard to find someone with one though.)
"The tiny discs will be able to store up to five hours of CD-quality music, one hour of video, 1,000 digital photos, one video game or 100 e-books -- or any combination, up to 500 megabytes of storage."
Let's see 80 minutes of CD-quality music now uses 700 MB of space. How exactly does 300 minutes of CD-quality music fit on 500 MB?
Blank discs, which can store up to 500 megabytes of data, will retail for between $10 and $12
Wow, much better than the $15 I'm paying for 50 700 MB CD's. A single 500 MB disk for the price of over 20 GB of blank CD's. Where do I get in line?
"I just know by being in the business, there's definitely a need for a portable format," Bob Higgins said. "Portable CD players are too big and too bulky."
Gee, if there were only widely available, simple to use, portable digital music storage and listening devices on the market right now.
This sentence no verb.
* 2002-04-18 07:06:54 Copying Limits Stifle Innovation (articles,news) (rejected)
Take a look at me. I'm just a ridiculous nerd that can't barely know the visual difference between CD-R and CD-RW. Even though I know that this stupid idea won't be enough to avoid the so called digital piracy.
Let's see what they hope to get with this brand-new device:
- Some music companies will release the discs with hidden extra albums, which can be activated by entering codes bought at their Web sites for $8 to $13.
May I know the jack-ass who have had this stupid idea? I give a week to a chinese hacker find a way to activate the entire disk without paying a nickel. And I want to see the dam DMCA look for the anonymous hacker who would do this!- When connected, a user can also store data on the discs -- 250 megabytes on each side, for a total slightly less than the 650 megabytes that fit on a CD.
How long will take until the technical advisors wonders what will happen after a regular nerd have digital access to the disc content? Of course it will try to put all the content to its HD and get rid of the dam disc.Due to its small size it's obvious that it can become very popular, even replacing that old 3"1/2 floppies, and the 5"1/4 CDs. When this happen, GPLds hackers will want to access the disc and all its contents, then they can say goodbye to the copy protections and the cryptographic methods.
- Dataplay incorporates safeguards to prevent songs sold on the discs from being copied to computers, a major plus for the music industry.
First of all, a major plus for the music industry should be quality, this shows that MPAA isn't worryied about the consumer, but about theirselves. Should we buy products from an industry that cares that much about the consumer? All they worry about is money, and not about the consumer's satisfactionAnd the technical issue. As I said before, there's no way to avoid it to happen. It's digitaly recorded and there's a machine wich reads it, so it's completely possible to hack it and get it's digital content.
- Sony introduced the compact, rewritable Minidisc in 1992, and while moderately popular in Japan and Europe, it has never caught on in the United States.
And how do they want to introduce a lower-quality product? Have their technical advisors realized that there already is a very good competitor? I wouldn't buy a new and inferior product if the better one is avaiable and already is spreaded in the market.- (under a picture)
- South Korea's iRiver Inc. is expected to release a music player that uses the tiny Dataplay discs in June.
This shows that the format is about to born already dead, in South Korea there already is avaiable MDs and as stated before, they are much better. Even if it becomes a success, there's no DMCA in Korea, so we'll have a GPLd player even sooner.- Other partner companies plan to incorporate Dataplay discs in digital cameras and small handheld movie viewers, to be released later this year. A disc can store a two-hour movie at a low resolution suitable for small screens.
Finally something intelligent about this piece of shit. IMHO a standard "high-capacity" storage medium is needed in the market, each device has its own medium, and it can become a standard for the industry.For all this that I have seen, and their technical advisors haven't, I think that they need new advisors. Maybe I'm one of the ellectibles, maybe everybody reading slashdot can be a good advisor for them, but first they need to find out this.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
...I find that I'm really glad that I bought a MiniDisk player/recorder instead of the MP3 player.
Pros:
* Cheap disks - $2 each as opposed to $45 a compact flash card
* Quality player devices - can survive a trek into the off road bike trails with no skip
* Good sound reproduction - as good as 256bit MP3 (in my opinion)
* Holds 74 minutes - more if you downsample the music (built into most new recorders)
* using analog input - prevents any copy protection as it can record from the headphone-out jack
* Can erase and re-use disks, or delete an unwanted track
* Player costs the same as a MP3 player (32-64mb devices)
Cons:
* Did not catch on as well in the US as other standards (MP3, CD/CD-R)
* Can only record in real time (not too much of a problem as I will listen to a CD all the way the first time...takes no effort to record at the same time)
So the record companies can do whatever they want. We will find a way around whatever the @#$% they try to throw at us. They never seem to learn that there is ALWAYS a way to get around whatever they want to do to us. I found a way that works well for me, others will find thier own way.
Nero often is described as playing the violin as Rome burned. When the RIAA burns, I'll be playing the bagpipes
Phoenix
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
So let me get this straight.. blank DataPlay discs are going to be about $10-$12. Discs with an album on them are going to sell for $16. Ok, by those numbers it's $4-$6 that the record company makes off each one.
So when mass production allows DataPlay discs to be produced for 25 cents a piece, we should be able to buy pre-recorded ones for $5?
(yes, I do realize this has no hope in hell of happening. but the question does need to be raised)
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
There seems to be some misconceptions about fair use around here. In the US and most other western countries, you have the legal right to copy portions of copywrited work for certain purposes. Thats is, you have the right to photocopy portions of a book, or use part of a song in a presentation. I'm sure someone else could provide more information of the detail of how much.
However there is no right guaranteeing that you can use this, that is a copywrite holder has the right to try and prevent the fair use of his work, however the copywrite holder has no legal was to prevent fair use. Even the DMCA and the whateverthehellthehollingsbilliscalledtoday do not try and prevent fair use, but they make it harder to be able to use it 'fairly', while trying to prevent it being used unfairly.
This is very much like free speech, you have the right to say whatever you want, but no right to be heard (ie published).
Obviously fair use is in everyones best intrest, it can only help publicize work and it gives people the ability to use portions of it, but it is a casualty of trying to prevent non-fair use.
I agree these might be an OK replacement for CF in general.
But the main focus for this thing is to sell music in a protected format. They want to produce DataPlay based music players, and get the public used to using this format. I think a measure of how well this technology might do is to see how many music players built with this storage medium support MP3's stored on the disc - my guess is few to none.
Furthermore, I'm not at all sure you'll see digital cameras that support this format. Why? Because you then limit yourself to this storage size, instead of being able to support 1GB+ CF storage. The cheapness of it might negate that effect though, and make some low-end cameras support this format... though you'd think a camera maker (and buyer!) would want to make suure the format wasn't going to die on the vine before they support it. But then again the resolutions cameras are going to quickly make this format too limiting.
To summarize, here's an argument for why it seems to me it's a format meant to push music. It seems to have too many drawbacks to really replace CF (limited device support and fixed size). SD already supports copyright protection controls, so they could have released music on that, but it would be too expensive. Thus, the only reason they are pushing this new format is because it's cheap enough to relase an album on. From that stream-of-thought you can then deduce the only reason this format is being pushed is to try and sell protected music in stores.
A last note - why I would pay CD prices for a lossy compressed version of a song is beyond me. I would wish them good luck, but frankly I hope it's a full-on DIVX syle failure that leads me to abandoning some other poor store (for the rest of my life I refuse to shop at Circuit City as a result of supporting DIVX).
Further note - if you (meaning: The Man [translation - companies developing this stuff]) bother to release a new compact storage format, please make sure first it can support DVD levels of storage so I can have a decent 10MP digital camera and store more than a few images in raw format.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How to kill the format? Get Wired to say it's the greatest thing since the Edison phonograph.
- - - -
The real Tetsujin 28 is a giant robot.
DataPlay users will be able to record directly from CDs they already own, but Quigley predicts those users will be a minority. Most people, he said, will go ahead and buy their favorites again in the new format.
But will we be able to record music from DataPlay to the next format?
The shareholder is always right.
You assume an artist will be willing to put their blockbuster song EXCLUSIVELY on this new format. "Hey, lets only sell our music on these neat little disks few people have heard of, no one asks about in the stores and no one has players for yet"... Artists and their agents cant be THAT stupid...
It was an uphill battle for CDs for the same reason--however CDs had advantages over tapes and records. CDs hold more music, are physically smaller, and somewhat more robust than records. Unlike tapes they are random access--no seeking for songs--and they dont wear out. To top it all off, CDs sound better than tapes and (to most people) records. Despite that, it took many years to become mainstream, and the backing of the GIANT SONY corporation.
So whats new here? We have a smaller disk, but less capacity than a CD (put MP3s on a data CD and they hold more hours of music), no better sound quality, 3 times the expense for players, and they are functionally cripled by content control "features". And as much as the potential for multimedia (video, etc) is played up...well DVD's, CD-R's, flash memory media, miniDV tapes, etc seem to do fine for any kind of digital content.
Recording executive's wet dream to be sure, but there is absolutely nothing here to lure a customer away from any existing choices...
Well...unless RIAA petitions successfully in the US to have those choices made illegal under the DMCA because the facilitate the illegal distribution of copyrighted music...
Uh, huh. This guy is a real business 'genius'. A pity these guys aren't public, shorting them would be a good investment.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Whoa.. hold on now.. I get great benefits like lower sound quality, can't play it on my current equipment, can't make a legitimite copy of it.. AND I get to pay more? This is great!
On a serious note, correct me if I'm wrong, but when the hell could companies get away with charging more for a product that does less, and still make it a viable business model? I mean, that the kind of stuff only monopolies *coughRIAAcough* get away with.. oops.. I said too much. *hides*
slashdot!=valid HTML
Lets look at the problems with this product
1. Compression, they use lossy compression so of course lower audio quality.
2. CD's already have a foothold, why the hell would i want to buy more usless junk when i can hardly play anything on it.
3. Its devolution not evolution.
4. Copy protection is futile, as long as the audio is output decrypted its copyable. Unless they do the decryption in the headphones. Then its just really hard.
I'm going to laugh if someone acctully buys one of these. But then there are britiny spears fans who have rich parents. Enough said.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
Just get everyone who visits slashdot to donate 1 or 2 or 10 dollars to the EFF, then have the EFF run a public service ad campaign.
A solution to the problem with music today
The costs are too high. Unless you give away the players, there is no way people are gonna drop money for a new device.
The blank price is too high as well.
-- There's only one replacement for displacement.....
I think this, like DVD, is another good idea. My reasoning is thus: I have never bought a CD in my life, I own one DVD (it was on sale for £10). I have no moral problems with downloading ripped music, videos or anything else. For this reason i have saved much money over the years and when i see other peoples massive CD collections i always feel better knowing that they wasted thousands of pounds on it. I can spend my money on other things and therefore _appear_ to have more money. Not only this, but i'm not restricted as to what i can fast-forward through, what devices i can play stuff on, or what country i can play stuff in.
If stupid people want to buy this stuff, let them. I tell people how much it costs to press a CD, how DVDs restrict what the owner can do, and how buying all these things is supporting those corporate pigs and they just stare at me. F*ck'em, f*ck'em all, they can go and waste their money on inferior products and find that its incompatible with everything else and obsolete by next year. They can go and pay for Windows XP and be forced to sign-up for MSN, they can have their computers turned into remote controlled corporate cash machines and they can live with it.
Ok, granted they are helping to fuel the evil corporations who then go on to bribe governments into doing their bidding, but in the end, when people are being arrested for fast-forwarding though adverts, or putting music on their portable, i can sit back, laugh, and say "I told you so, you dumb fuck"
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
It shows you how serious they must be about pushing this new standard if they simultaneously are working on 30 Gig blue DVD rewriteables.
5 Britney Spears album on one un-erasable disk? Oh, the humanity.
Napster comes in, CD sales go up 8%.
Napster goes OUT, CD sales go DOWN 5%.
What in the Sam Hill are they putting in the water coolers at the RIAA?
If I can hear the music first, I'll buy it. If, like in central CT, there are two dozen candy-ass radio stations all following maybe four godforsaken formats, there's a better likelyhood that I'll hemorrhage from hearing "Rock The Boat" seventeen times a day before I'll hear something I want to try.
Of course, if MTV would try playing music again, maybe we'd have another venue for music that wasn't an inch wide and a mile deep. Not convinced? Here's the show list for the plucky little channel...
Andy Dick / Becoming / Celebrity Deathmatch / Cribs / Daria / Diary / Dismissed / Fashionably Loud: Swimsuit 2002
Fear / Icon: Aerosmith / Making The Band / Making the Video Movie Awards 2002 / National Sex Quiz / Now What
The Osbournes / The Real World / Road Rules / Real World/Road Rules Challenge / Rock N Jock
Señor Moby's House of Music / Spring Break / TRL / Unplugged / Video Music Awards 2001 / WWF Tough Enough
Any channel that has The Osbornes, Andy Dick, the Real World and the WWF needs a name change, a new mission statement, and a prescription pad.
Like most people who can afford the necesary bandwidth in the first place, I have more money than time. I haven't the hours nor the inclination to burn everything I want to own. I go buy it. HMV and Borders are on my commute. Or I click and three days later it's in my mailbox, total extra investment of time - about 3 minutes.
I've downloaded much gig of music, and deleted nearly all of it once purchased. It's an iBook, not a server farm. I believe I have at most a half dozen CD-R keepers - mostly the stuff I'd gotten and paid for on mp3.com back when they were sane, and a whole bunch of rare tracks and but-wait-there's-more - the entire TIAA-CREF investment primer library so I can afford all this stuff in the first place (lousy beat, but you can dance to it all the way to the bank).
If I burned everything I ever downloaded to sample, I'd have a large, substandard collection of badly labeled CD-Rs, no life, dead tropical fish, and Howard-Hughes-league fingernails. Not to mention a cataloging system nowhere near the intuitiveness and familiarity of a bookcase, alphabetical by artist.
The RIAA should kiss Shawn's nappy little ass for providing the only true breakthru in music marketing since the music video. But as usual, the industry has figured out how to tie the whole relaunch up in knots because even BMG really doesn't like the whole thing but they smell money. I doubt it was a sanctified "we should be honestly representing our artist's interest" but rather a pant-wetting "holy crap - see these DL logs? can you imagine a dollar sign in front of each of these?" I mean please - it's taken them a year to not get ready, and from the get go they won't be able to write a MacOS client (no mention of any other platforms) and they can't for the life of them figure out how to take credit AND debit cards at the same time. There are one-man roasted cashew operations in East Rainbucket, Maine who can do this.
I gotta go.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
When all the music companies try and put 5 CDs worth of music on these disks (to be unlocked by a special registration code), we will all get 5 CDs for the price of 1! Oh, yeah, I'm sure no one will break their reg code.. ha!
I think the big problem with this is that there is no real benefit to switching over to another digital format. I mean, CDs won out by replacing magnetic media (tapes and floppies) and records. I don't think we'll see another shift until we switch over to solid-state media - ROM chips or Flash cards of some sort.
People are stupid, but they're not as irrational as some high power execs like to imagine.
Hmmm. 2x250 = 500. 500/650 = 10/13 = 0.769. That's actually something like 23% less data. Someone less beholden to the Content Cartel could have written this as "It holds nearly one quarter less music", and it would have been more accurate to boot.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Take the ATRAC psycho-acoustic compression scheme used for minidiscs, where the quality is virtually indistinguishable from that of a CD. A minidisc stores 140 MB of raw data, so that means a bitrate of approximately 256 kbps. So compression can give good results, if you use an adequate bitrate and a quality encoder. There's no reason for MP3 files to NOT sound good, too; of course, if you're talking of a 128kbps rip of a complex orchestral recording, you're gonna suffer a loss, but the same piece encoded at 320kbps will hardly be distinguishable from the real thing.
Unless of course, you're talking about one of those freak audiophiles who spend 30 grand on a bizantine rig which can only play vinyl LPs...
If CD sales are flat ... for whatever reason you think that might be ... how is a new format going to bring in new sales? Are people holding off on buying new content so they can end up spending money buying the same content on a new format? Suppose it is the case ... as the industry claims ... that internet piracy is the cause of reduced CD sales. How is a new format going to make people uninterested in the internet piracy? Do they think that people will abandon sharing and trading online to buy this new format? Maybe if the format completely replaces CDs and perfectly prevents ripping it could make it hard to have source material for trading. But that won't happen since if you can hear it, you can rip it, and even though that won't be perfect digital quality, it won't ever degrade any further over the net, and people are already happy to download poor quality rips.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Discs are fragile. CF is sturdy. I can safely slip a CF card into my pocket without using a protective case. This is important with digital cameras. (Also, SmartMedia is fragile. MemoryStick is proprietary. CF rules.)
I don't mind bias. Everyone has their bias. Not everyone will admit their biases. It's better to read knowing the author's bias than to read a piece without knowing the author's bias.
Even folks that strive for objectivity are still biased. Much of the time, when you see a "pro" statement balanced by the "anti" statement, that's not being objective and it's not being neutral, that's sloppy reporting.
And that's the lesson of Heisenberg, Hunter S. Thompson, Global Warming and the whole post modern movement.
Welcome to 2002.
Well at $13 per blank disc, no kidding.
This of course, assuming i'm stupid enough to get this new format in the first place.
Oh hell no. The barn door has been open FAR too long for CDR to go away.
CDR prices would have to increase by 25 times to match the prices of the this new tech... and seeing as there is money to be made in selling CDR, they will not go away soon.
Even the biggest players do not have to power to stop a movement as big as making your own CD or downloading music off the internet. I feel that moves like this show the very desperation that indicates they have very little options left in the form of 'prevention'.
Media is so 90s.
Cheers,
Backov
In the law there is no overlap between theft and copyright infringement whatsoever.
We just have to be able to read them. Then we can copy the bits, encrypted or not, to a different disk. As long as we can make a device that makes an identical copy, we'll be fine.
Of course, it's going to be easier to just not buy the things in the first place :) I still don't have a DVD player, because of my initial disgust at the region coding thing.
The R/W drives should run about $200 according to
the WSJ article on this subject
(http://ptech.wsj.com/ptech.html).
Sure, it's a non-starter as a medium for
mass-market publishing -- but who cares about
that?! DataPlay offers tiny portable drives
that store 500MB on a disk the size of a
quarter! That rocks. Disregard their access control
crap. Everyone will ignore that, and use them
exclusively as file-systems.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I think the reason is that CDs are so freakin' profitable. How much does it cost to stamp out a CD, 15 cents? Add a bit more plastic and a paper insert and they still don't spend more than a few dollars for a normal CD. Then they sell it for a gigantic markup, keeping most of the profit while giving little to the artist.
To normal people, internet distribution sounds like a good idea, but to the RIAA executives who make several dollars a CD from other people's creative works, it doesn't. It doesn't sound good to the shareholders of RIAA member companies either, because they just want the labels to keep spitting out money from CD sales. Hillary Rosen et al just want to stick to the established business model that they know is ridiculously profitable.
I like the sound of it: "Education process".
Sounds a lot like the Reeducation that was customary for people in communism. Disagree with the government, and be reeducated, preferrably in healthy sibirian climate. Although it is certainly to the credit of capitalism that here not governments do the "Reeducation" but it is left to the private sector.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted and ignored otherwise.
Preface: Along with my degree in MIS, I received a degree also in Entrepreneurship and engaged in two different and very successful start-ups during my college career, including being named outstanding student in the program.
There is an adage that is accepted wrongly by entrepreneurs that "If I can get 2% of the Chinese market to buy my product, that's a whole lot of money". The second adage is don't try to force the market, let the market come to you.
So let's start at the beginning:
We have a 4 year old high-risk, high reward startup with a backing of $119 million dollars to date and 240 employees.
Management Team: From what I can come up with so far is that Steve Volk was the president of an 8 year-old company called Integral Peripherals before this position. Due to a change in the market the company failed and Steve left to start DataPlay. I like to see management teams that are "A" list and who aren't afraid of new ideas. But executives who don't see the future I have a big problem with.
Consumer Acceptance: The premise of DataPlay repeated throughout the article was portability and archiving capabilities of DataPlay. I would accpet this if indeed it was still 1998. However, you have two sides of the market kicking you in the teeth along with a great number of external factors contributing to a very tough hill to climb.
1. Drop in CF, CD, and Flash memory prices to the point that they all are in the consumer's mind or so inexpensive that there is no need for the format.
2. Passed failure of such products as the Iomega HipZip. While not giving the same amount of space it did have the same idea. A bad idea regurgitated is still a bad idea.
3. No increased value proposition for the consumer. Why would a consumer buy material when they will receive in their own mind that same material just in a different format. I believe this is a SERIOUS miscalculation. The switching costs of going from CD to MP3 is negligible, all you give away is time or if you want to buy one of those rinky pieces of software to do it. Switching to the DataPlay format you have time and also the costs of new media and new hardware. So not only is their no compelling reason to "upgrade" content (ie DVD superior quality and special goodies") it also costs the consumer.
I found this comment extremely amusing considering it came from a VC
"Portability and price will draw in the 18-34 age group first, predicts Bob Higgins, chairman and CEO of Albany, N.Y.-based Trans World Entertainment. The company invested in DataPlay last year, and Higgins sits on its board of directors."
The market did react to these two pieces in 2000. You can now buy MP3 CD Players, In-Car stereos, MP3 players. Indeed every major electronics major now produces one or all three of these, and DataPlay is expecting these companies to "Jump on the Bandwagon". While many of the content companies are there, (it cost them little) it does cost hardware makers a great deal to tool up (remember Divx).
Personally, I should go research this a little more but these are just some of the failings I see at the moment. I actually might write a case on this company (it intrigues me now) and send it back to the school.
With A 20GB Archos MP3 player who needs it? Just another way to get me to buy the same music again. Until it sounds better than CD, Why bother? Give me a dvd audo disc the size of a quarter and we might talk.
I can just hear it now. "Damn", "What?" "I just dropped my Nivana Dataplay Disc in the freakin Coke machine!" "Whoa dude, how many Cokes you get for it?"
Member DIVX (the lame DVD format)?
Well, this sucks even harder than that did, and will disappear even faster.
Short of out-and-out trust building behaviour that even the Bush administration could not ignore, this strategy is going NOWHERE!
Market traction is essential for a strategy like this to work. Faaaar too many folks are aware of what happened with DVD's (early adopters, especially) and they won't be burned again.
This one is still-born , folks.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
The discussion of failed formats (Betamax, DAT, that phillips digital tape thing that competed with minidisc, divx dvds) points out the obvious -- it's hard to get consumers to move to a new format. In fact you could say that the CD's success was really an abberation -- most formats fail.
I think this one will succeed, for a few reasons:
1: It's marginally open -- from the consumers point of view they can copy stuff around.
2: Most people can grasp the idea that they can 'fit' a certain amount on a disk, and it sounds likely that you _wouldn't_ need a PC to operate this thing as you most definitely do to feed MP3 players.
3: The record companies will now give you two options: A: The record on CD w/no extras, or B: the dataplay format with the album, a couple of other albums you might buy access to in the future (and can preview now), and VALUE ADDED CONTENT -- the dataplay format might offer the same music as the CD, but add in 20-30 minutes of video, or a game or fill-in-the-blank. So joe q consumer at musicland sees two formats, same price, one offers more content.
4: The record companies will likely start releasing the CD only 6-12 months after releasing on dataplay, if at all.
5: They're sure to have a bevvy of lawyers litigating against anyone they detect who is reverse engineering or otherwise cracking the dataplay protection. DMCA to the rescue!
And that sucks. Suppose I want to buy the led zeppelin album 'in through the out door', but the record companies only have two dataplay disks -- 1 has "dark side of the moon" as it's main album with led zeppelin II & III as extra 'buy in' albums on the same disk. The other has 'Led Zeppelin IV' as the main title, with 'houses of the holy' and 'in through the out door' as the 'buy in' albums. This means I have to buy the disk that contains that album for $16 + tax, then go to their website or call to 'unlock' the album I want for an extra $13. I can see why the record companies would be drooling at the prospect -- especially since all of the systems that have to be put in place to cover costs will probably justify them in ratcheting down artist royalties even further.
Or I could just listen to my old cds, copy them to my mp3 player (lets face it, most people have some kind of PC access -- certainly the people willing/able to plunk down $300 for a dataplay player)
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
Good point. Same here, in fact, I only know of one person with an MP3 player, who upgraded to a minidisc - they're cheaper and quite popular here (Australia) - just because it never took off in the US it's still reasonably popular elsewhere in the world and far from a dead format.
The sound quality of the CDs was better than vinyl discs and they tended to be more durable and far more portable than LP's and 45's. In this case, you get less quality, no easy ability to copy to any of the standard formats (Casette doesn't exist in cars much anymore, but you will find CD and MP3 players...), and is being fronted by the media companies and one tech company.
This is Sony's minidisc all over again. (And don't believe that Sony didn't try to force the issue with the format either- they did.)
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Cheap Discs - An MP3 CD player can hold many times more music and for $0.10 per disc. You're paying for miniaturization there in the case of the flash cartriges.
Quality players - An MP3 CD player can do much the same thing and the solid state units don't have moving parts and are MUCH smaller.
Good sound reproduction - depends on the music; side by side listening produced virtually no difference between 128kbit and the 74 minute mode on a Minidisc player.
Holds 74 minutes - nice, but if you're downsampling, you're definitely down in the same area as the MP3 players and for length of play you can't beat the MP3 CD units. Up to 10 hours of play on ONE CD mix.
Using analog output - ANYTHING can do that.
Can erase and reuse discs, or delete an unwanted track- If I use CD-RW's the MP3 CD player can match that except for the easy single deletion and the solid state units can do the same things as the Minidisc player.
Player costs the saem as a MP3 player (32-64mb devices)- an MP3 CD player can be bought for as little as $60.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas