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Napster Pre-Paid Cards
G4Outcast writes "According to this CNN Money article, Napster will be offering pre-paid cards costing $14.85 at several retail locations. I guess the iTunes gift certificate and allowance idea is catching on."
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Does anyone else find it amusing that all the companies offering these prepaid cards for sale have had hits on their stock prices? Sure, it's probably unrelated, but hey...
And what about the security of this scheme? Surely they have to have a way of authenticating the cards, or otherwise there's going to be a horde of duplicates flooding the market.
Well, here's a few points of interest: - What about things OTHER than Music, SOME PEOPLE *cough* download old TV shows or video clips, or even less mainstream music (lots of techno/trance stuff) that are almost impossible to find anywhere else, And while I think it'll be a while before people are downloading any software they want under the same subscription, what about things like movie trailors, and utilities, or pictures? - Is this new Napster P2P? Or server based, if It's P2P, then is there not a risk of getting the same garbled songs as found on Kazaa and variants? how do they plan to verify songs? - Are there any projects, to distribute things like ISO's, Source Code (With some type of verification of course), photography, free art or other free material? while yes many programs claim to distribute only free material, are there any that can use MD5 Summing to verify content, (other than whatchamacallit, freenet? that one that no one uses :P) Something like a searchable P2P network of .torrents,
- What incentive does this or any other service have over larger, more diverse networks such as Kazaa, or iMesh, (I'm not sure which of those are on the same network), besides legality, which I think it's been firmly established, is basically a non-factor in the mind of the consumer.