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AOL Allies With Sony For PS2 Services
AEton writes "America Online has announced that it will merge some of AOL Instant Messenger's features with the Playstation 2. Through the 'AIM Talk' service which they plan to offer, any PS2 user with a headset will be capable of voice messaging with any other PS2 or PC user. AOL will also offer PS2 users streaming music and video clips and a new gaming AOL Players Club service. These services will require more hardware: a 40GB drive for the PS2 (new in the United States) will be required to use AOL's software when it is released in early 2004."
Your average Joe doesn't hate AOL so no bashing AOL on this thread please. This move will hopefully help crush any chance of Microsoft Xbox Live, which is basically total and completely controlled by them. That last thing we need is a more powerful M$.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
Are they planning on releasing a generic headset for the PS2? The only one out now is packed in with Socom.
--riney
Cant wait to see a PS2 hack for Linux.
Though the Xbox does look a little more eye pleasing but I'm sure casemods could fix that little problem.
$5 says Microsoft implements a similar way of voice chatting with PC users.
Your average Joe hates Aol and Microsoft the same. They get frustrated at it because they don't know how to use it. I find that a little education and most people are happy with a PC running XP connected with AOL to the internet.
Would I choose that combo? NO Way. But for people that aren't tech savy, MS, MSN and AOL have done a fairly good job of keeping it simple for the end user to accomplish what they think a computer is used for. I run web editing, photo editing, video editing, and a TON of games on my run of the mill PC with XP on it. Microsoft has finally gotten some things right.
(zzzzzzzzzzzzzziiiiiip!)
Shawn
Requires a 40GB hard drive for chat functionality? What the heck!?!
(I'm sure there is a good reason, but it just struck me as strange.)
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
If you hate your phone company, consider what it would be like if that phone company was Microsoft.
Xbox Live, presumming MS manges to talk enough people into installing it, could become a way of using long distance especially for kids away at college (great excuse to get an xbox, too). Sony can try the same thing. Eventually one of them is going to offer a gateway of POTS to VoIP; this will be a number or 1-800 number and extension you can get for a few dollars a month, and they will have outgoing gateways in every areacode so they never pay long distance.
In fact, YOU will pay the long distance, by buying your bandwidth. This is exactly the kind of shady high-margin shit that attracts MS types like flies (actually now that I think about it maybe that explains a lot of the character of telecoms). You pay for everything, you can shop around for bandwidth and ISPs so those guys get to live on razor thin margins, and MS (or sony,or whoever else gets their paws in there) just reaps a huge margin for maintaining a database and a routing table.
You don't need to worry about the real telecoms offering any competition. Ed Whitacre's 80 Million a year salary is exactly why this opportunity is there. (What the fuck is the economy going to look like when SBC and their ilk shed a half million jobless into into the market ? But that's another issue.)
Needless to say this is a nightmare for anyone who believes in an open society.
What we need to do is build our own peer-to-peer VoIP telecom. We need to setup and easy to install package, or a run-from-cd that requires a dedicated box, to allow someone to set up their own VoIP gateway, voice mail with as many extensions as they want, etc. That will get us part of the way.
But what we really need to do is make it worth people's while to run gateways into the regular telephone system, until we grow so large that they need to offer gateways to us. For this we need a distributed tit-for-tat minutes bartering system and clearing house.
For example, you could hook up your new GnuTelephone and set it to allow the use of your SBC line for local calls only from midnight to 6 am, 1 cent a minute; during the day it would be annoying to have the phone in use so you charge 8 cents a minute; and in the evening you might want to have your phone available, so you would not allow it at all. After a few months you have racked up several hundred dollars credit with the system, in reality with a variety of other individuals whose credit can be exchanged in a clearing house for where you want to spend your minutes.
About that time you would get a nasty letter from your telecom; but you can just cancel the line and spend out your credit for a few months.
The real way to make money in the system would be to set up gateways in high volume areas. Ultimately some enterprising individuals would have to begin using 802.1x to provide some of their own bandwidth, starting with connecting across national borders (biggest difference in phone rates that way). But that might be out of the reach of most of the hobbiests.
After that you would have to buy credit in the system, or get another phone to build up credit, or whatever. Hopefully if you were careful with your minutes you could last until the phone companies imploded into a moldering heap of stolen pension plans.
The final result would be a society which spent much less on communications, but people who actually did real communications (lay wire, setup routers, etc) would get paid a lot more (as independents, of course).
Most of the current people in telecom companies won't be there of course. They will be in the labor market somewhere because their pensions will have been stolen and they can't retire, but these people are not wired right to be able to do business on their own; they couldn't even go door to door with a lawn mower mowing lawns for $20. (Because they'd spend the first week of summer seeing lawyers about the liability issues, or some shit.)
If we don't do this, MS/AOL/Sony is going to take over raping us for telephone service where Verizon/SBC/WorldCom left off.
What does chatting on AOL have to do with gaming? It may be good for those who don't have a PC though.
My mind was so stunned by the Matrix Revolutions that I was blown away to idiocy!
Well that's great. Now we have the worst OSP (Online Service Provider) and the worst online gaming service, if you can even call it a service, in one big crappy... errr I mean happy family!
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
Does this mean AOL will be able to fill our PS2 up with advertising? They have a pretty popular messenger but it has a lot of advertising in it, plus a big popup thing that shows even more adveritsing when you run it.
A use for my otherwise useless PS2 keyboard.
"Anyway, long story short... is a phrase whose origins are complicated and rambling...." - Abraham Simpson