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Wi-Fi Enabled Stereo From Philips In Beta
Orangerobot writes "Philips Electronics is undergoing the beta test for the latest model in the Streamium line called the MC-i250. You have to trudge through a cheesy Flash presentation to get all the details, but it looks pretty good: Wi-Fi, CDDB support, online playlist management and more. It looks like they might actually get it right." Reader UVWarning's review of the current generation of Streamium indicates plenty of ways the next generation could improve on the current one.
Danger Danger. I might buy a licence to listen to my new Coldplay album this week and assume its a licence FOREVER. But - the bastards go bust and shut down the service 3 years from now to replace it with a SUBSCRIPTION service - now I have to pay a $20 initial purchase plus $5 annual subscripiton for that album.
No. I wan't some media! In my hand - that plays on generic hardware. No more. No less.
Peercast will die the fate of popular P2P networks. Hailed as "the more users the better it works", the reality is: "too many users and it dies becasue non of these users have enough bandwidth to be hub". I have seen 10Mbit connections die because a PC was a Kazaa host. Kazaa saw it had a lot of bandwidth and made it a master. Ofcourse IT infrastructure shut this PC down.
A carefully designed P2P protocol will not necessarily suffer this fate. If I remember correctly the PeerCast protocol is designed to avoid this by rerouting streams when a link gets saturated.
Generally speaking design can greatly affect a P2P network. I'm not surprised that Kazaa would have a problem like this, but don't forget that even DNS and Usenet are in a very real sense P2P applications. P2P doesn't mean that an application has to be completely disstributed (like gnutella) or centralized (like napster). P2P is about having autonomous nodes accomplishing a task together. Protocol design is the key to harnessing all that power lying around.
.: Max Romantschuk