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AOL Making Media Player, Music Store
An anonymous reader writes "BetaNews is reporting that AOL Music is ramping up its efforts to release a new Media Player independent of the AOL client software, with a long-term goal of building its own music store. The company plans to bring AMP outside its "walled garden.""
AOL's Media Player = AMP, and they want to win, right? So there you go, Winamp!
Don't get your hopes up just yet, the article is quick to mention that:
"Surprisingly, AMP is not based on AOL's Winamp platform, only utilizing Winamp's "Unagi" playback engine. Instead, AMP is built atop the company's Communicator XUL user interface framework. Communicator was first unveiled in beta form two years ago and eventually evolved into Fanfare."
However, AOL did say "its new Media Player is not a competing product and has different audience, as Winamp users are not likely AOL users."
Is this the knockout punch for Winamp? What did Netcraft say?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
ITunes . . .
ME TOO!
-Peter
Why not cut out the middle man and just mail you CDs with music on them?
Beep beep.
On the forefront of new technology and not just jumping on someone else's bandwagon.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Not surprising, but interesting as AOL already has several arrangements with Apple to allow AOL Music, AOL accounts, etc., interoperate with the iTunes Music Store:
Apple and America Online Announce Online Music Alliance
AOL Members Now Have Instant Access to Apple's iTunes Music Store
iTunes Music Store AOL account signin
Even though they write:
AOL says its new Media Player is not a competing product and has different audience, as Winamp users are not likely AOL users.
I really cant see why they shouldnt use winamp instead, and bless the aol users with a good player..
( I havent had any first hand experience with aol software, but the horror stories dont make me want to try it out...)
iTunes already has most of the market share, and AOL certainly isn't a very popular name among many computer users. People that use AOL will probably be semi-interested, but with AOL's trouble... that might not be very many people. Non-AOL users will likely choose iTunes over it, without much thought.
With a little luck, they might just break even.
We know one store is just as good as another if the songs are digital. The question is....
1.) Can they be cheaper than Apple at 99 cents with a product as good as iTunes.
2.) Can they be cheaper than Walmart at 88 cents period.
This looks more like AOL's initial pust to eventually get themselves into the music store business, not to replace an existing MP3 player.
...promises of 1048 free hours of Yanni in my mailbox, encased in a tin, sent to me every other week.
SNACKS ARE AWESOME
My parents have been on AOL since v3.0 and are finally upgrading to cable (I can't stand returning from my college T1 line to dial-up). The media player came around before AOL bought Winamp, so that explains why it's separate. I just am curious about AOL's overall strategy with it breaking up into 4 separate companies, phasing out broadband, discontinuing Winamp, making its own browser (to compete with its own Netscape I guess), and now trying to push a standalone media player when the market for them is already saturated with free programs. The only real advantage to AMP was that it could do the standard formats (wmv, mp3, avi, etc) and RealPlayer media as well.
Because every CD in the known universe has already had a free AOL account burned into it.
Besides, who the hell's crazy enough to employ a business model based on distributing lossless copies of non-DRM-hobbled music files on 650-megabyte removable media? :)
(blinks)
Um... AOL... music service...
Zzzzzzzzz.......
--- Ban humanity.
Are these the same walls that prevent the AOL marketing department from getting their filthy little hands on winamp?
Look what happened the last time someone slipped over the wall... *cough*Winamp 3*cough*.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
I, for one, do want a better Internet with cool technologies like automatic Email virus protection, *free* web popup blocking, full parental controls, and *free* SuperBuddy(TM) icons and am sure all of you do too! Yay AOL!
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Time Warner owns AOL. The other members of the big five would be dumb as hell to support this by opening their catalogs up to it. If anything, it would be an incentive to help the iTMS defeat AOL because every song that the AOL Music Store sells for them would also go into helping a competitor, Time Warner.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Companies are only as good as its best engineers, and yet top managers think engineers are dime a dozen like an accountant, so the bean counters do what they can do reduce costs and get subpar loosers who only program because its a job, not a passion and get subpar crud as result.
Why is there a work position such as 'manager' that has no real format training/dicipline like engineering and yet command 2-3x the salary? In our real worl, the engineers should get the 80k, and the manager should be on 60k.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
I'm interested in precisely who is AOL's targeted demographic for this product.
l e-People-Laugh-At-Us-Player, or they might go for WinAmp, which despite being deprecated is still popular (yes, it's owned by AOL, but I think it's still tagged NULLSOFT, which sounds better AOL/NULLSOFT? That's a rhetorical question).
The way I see it, the average totally incompetent user will just use MS Media Player given it's preinstalled, and probably does all they want (and anything it doesn't do probably won't occur to them anyway).
Then you have the more competent, slightly smarter (not that smart, still using Windows remember *cough*) user, who while looking for alternative is likely to dismiss AOL's offering simply because it's, well, made by AOL, who don't have a particularly cool aura about them. Even when their aren't good alternates around, I'd imagine even these users are more likely to stick with Media Player than migrate to AOL's You're-A-Fucking-Retard-Let-Me-Hold-Your-Hand-Whi
The only remaining demographic is incompetent users, who choose AOL as their ISP, two problems: 1) This market is declining, especially given the fact they seem only to care about dial up users, who themselves are in rapid decline, 2) These users are the sort who use the interet at most about an hour or less a day, and are probably over 50. In short, they are the least likely people to be interested in purchasing music online.
In summary: AOL Sucks! and most people who might potentially install their product are beginning to realise they suck. Anyone left, who might install it as a tie in to this particular ISP's crap-ware, is probably not going to use it, and even less likely to purchase music from it (which is the whole point from AOL's perspective).
Will AOL release this to the general public or to just AOL customers. My hunch says it will be for everyone, but with some special deals for AOL customers. What can AOL bring to the table that nobody else can? I don't think anything. A name? Would anyone use the AOL service because they knew the AOL name? iTunes is certainly better known. Will this drive AOL business? Would anyone buy AOL to get the better deals they offer? Doubtful... So what is the Competitive advantage AOL can bring to the mix? This is a dumb move with no way for AOL to differentiate or leverage any competitive advantage. They should fold up shop now, before they waste any more money on printing press releases!
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
The obvious name for what AOL ultimately intends to go up against iTunes would be "meTu-nes".
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Time Warner sold off Warner Music Group. Vivendi Universal sold off everything but Universal Music Group. This leaves Sony as the only major label that is also a major movie studio.
Look, trash AOL all you want to (really, I enjoy it!), but this is built on two technologies - one is the playback engine in Winamp (which, as I recall, was a fork of a BSD licenced cross platform player) and XUL.
That means that a major technology company is using XUL to build their apps. Is anyone putting this together with the previous announcment that there is a new Netscape - sure, it uses the IE rendering engine (triton) on IE specific sites, but thats embedded in an XUL interface!
AOL is actually _using_ the technology it developed when it ran Mozilla. This could mean AMP and AOL come to Linux/*BSD/Haiku/Amiga whatever alternative OS supported by XUL, same as Moz already does. It's like XUL brings rich client application written using thing client technologies - which is a big win for both the developer and alternative OS crowds.
I'm ecstatic to see XUL being made mainstream.