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HP Working With Apple To Add WMA Support To iPod
iPod Afficianado writes to a short piece at Connected Home magazine in which Paul Thurrott "is quoted as saying that HP's blockbuster deal with Apple will have one
exciting side effect. The company will be working with Apple to add support for
Microsoft's superior Windows Media Audio (WMA) format to the iPod by mid-year."
Superior to unencrypted audio (from a record company's point of view).
So, I gotta ask: how many people outside the open-source/Slashdot community are really aware of Ogg? A dozen? Twenty, maybe?
Look, my parents can barely program the VCR, much less decide between audio codecs, and they're typically technologies buyers. They may not get the hardcore geek sale, but they'll get The Masses, and that's where the money is. DRM will give them a backlash, yes, but the codec wars are not fought in the Best Buy crowd. They're fought here. And frankly, we're about the only ones who give a damn.
Give The Masses something that's portable, sounds like a CD, and is flexible, and they'll buy it. Argue with them over open source vs. licensed and bitrates and OHMYGODMYHEADEXPLODED.
You get the picture.
Jesus, so don't buy an iPod. The rest of the world uses the MP3 format, so that's what Apple supports.
You shouldn't have picked some smalltime format to encode everything in. It doesn't make good financial sense to support every little "eleet" latest fad format that the relatively small population of Linux geeks whine about this week. Next week, it'll be "GNU KewlAudio" or something.
Apple has heard you and they obviously don't care (as Ogg Vorbis support still isn't there). So, buy something else and stop whining.
How is this really all that unusual? What if Apple released a WinCE version of Quicktime player that let you play Quicktime videos on an HP iPaq? But that iPaq can also play WMV files, so is this smart or stupid of Apple?
I would say smart, because now they have another platform for their content. So isn't the same true for audio? Isn't of looking at it as "Apple is letting WMA infiltrate their iPod!" why isn't it "Apple has expanded AAC to another major portable brand."? You don't think HP has the resources to design their own player? If they had, it would almost assuredly be using Microsoft blessed DRM hobby kit known as WMA. But then HP would need to make decent player software, and find a partner to provide content...by partnering with Apple, they are piggybacking on the success of the existing iTunes client and store. Meanwhile Apple now is selling a player every time someone buys an iPod or the HP version and now has a new customer for iTMS either way.
Apple gets a larger audience used to AAC and iTMS which will someday make a profit, no doubt about it. Maybe right now its a loss-leader to sell iPods, but what do you think will happen next year when music companies post their quarterly reports showing the profits from this major new (and free) income stream? What happens when Apple goes back to renew the contract and says "you know this free money pouring in? Well, you're going to settle for $.30 or we start giving priority placement to indie labels" Not to mention, with the release of GarageBand, Apple is about one puzzle piece away from becoming a completely end-to-end music enterprise, starting with a dude running GarageBand and ending with a thousand people clicking "Buy It Now" on iTMS.
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
The "WMA superior" troll is not the only thing that stinks here. This is being reported by "Connected Home Mag" which I've never heard of before. It also states that "onlookers were surprised". Surprised where? At the recent Apple conference? We didn't hear it there. At an HP conference? Why hasn't anyone else picked up the story? I think this article is a load of B.S. At least until I see an official announcement from HP or Apple.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Has this "reporter" ever done one minute of research? 2 points alone kill his article.
1. Jobs stated in the last conference call (look it up at apple.com), there is no need to work with #2 when they are #1. This was in response to weather or not the iPod would support WMA.
2. Why would Apple allow HP to rebrand their player and gut their online store? Where is the profit? I know the argument of more iPod sales, but if that was all Apple really was after then why bother with the store in the first place? They could have spent that time and money making sure the iPod worked with every format known to man.
TANSTAAFL
why would you limit your future platform to play those music files?
15 years from now, if ANY of today's music file formats are still supported, odds are it will be mp3.
mp3 is so universal and easy. play it on mac os 9, os x, linux, freebsd, windows, dos, handhelds of all sorts, hardware players like my pioneer headunit, sony walkmans, game consoles.
hey. you want to limit your options...you go right ahead.
keep convincing yourself you made the right choice.