Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
This looks more like AOL's initial pust to eventually get themselves into the music store business, not to replace an existing MP3 player.
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.
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).
Winamp3 wasn't marketing driven at all. The problems with it are mostly the fault of an overambitious and poorly directed engineering team. Not that I think AOL would have directed them in a positive direction, but they definitely took a very hands-off approach to winamp.
The value of Nullsoft to them is in the multimedia A/X controls and server components which AOL has integrated into their client, and which they use for the playback core in the AOL Media Player.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
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.
hah! I worked on Sonique 2, before working for AOL on the media player.
Lycos lost the entire Sonique staff in mid 2001 through layoffs and subsequent quitting. At this point Sonique 2 was about 6 megs of nearly completely undocumented very complex code, with a number of subtle bugs and gotchas. So it's not a big surprise that when they hired a new guy or two to work on it a few months later he wasn't really able to make it ship-worthy on short order.
The original source of Sonique 2's problem though, is that it was 100% engineering driven. We never had any schedules or deadlines, so instead of hunkering down to get something to release quality, we ended up fooling ourself into thinking that advanced features were more important. As a result the alphas support loading skins from PSD files and support most of Photoshop's blend modes in realtime!
It was a tremendously fun place to work, since we mostly worked on the cool parts, but ultimately a little disillusioning.
I believe the main reason Lycos hasn't just axed Sonique entirely is they paid $80M for it and if they stop development entirely they have to admit that that money is a 100% loss. Certainly there's not a lot of incentive to vie for the title of best free media player.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!