Slashdot Mirror
Leaked Docs Show UK ISP BT Plans Music Service
An anonymous reader submits word of a leaked document that indicates that British Telecom "has plans to launch a new music download service which it hopes will steer users away from P2P file sharing . The introduction of the new service is aimed at giving its customers an alternative to file sharing and is already in the works with talks ongoing between the ISP and music labels such as Universal and EMI. When launched 'in the near future' the service is expected to offer BT's 5.5 million customers completely free music downloads for an initial period of 6-9 months after which an undecided monthly subscription fee will be charged for continued access to the service. The finer details of how the service will look and function is unknown at this stage, but will play a huge part in how successful (if at all) the service will be. Services like Spotify already exist and are hugely popular in the UK meaning BT will have to go the extra mile to convince users they have a service worth using."
Then we can share them more privately with trusted friends through ftp or whatever.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Let's hope they don't simply find it easier to degrade the quality of competing services. I get nervous (and cynical) when my ISP wants to sell me anything other than a pipe for bits.
I'll queue up downloads 24/7 for the first six months, and that should probably take care of any music I, my family, and my friends wanted anyhow.
If there's anything more important than my ego around here, I want it caught and shot immediately.
If British Telecom really *is* aiming at giving its customers "a alternative to file sharing"[sic], Spotify isn't competition, it's an ally.
Hey, don't jump the gun. Just because BT hasn't blocked BitTorrent yet doesn't mean it isn't part of the plan.
Give them a chance to get their stuff together first. They've got a quarterly puppy-kicking quota to meet before they can worry about little details like shafting the customer.
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I have worked for BT in the past. I can tell you now (and please put me on record here), this will be launched, they will chuck a boatload of cash at it, just to shut it down in 2 years... They have done this SOOO many times on different projects. Most notably was the PC's they sold for a while. They ended up buying them all back because there were so many issues with it. BT should stick to what they are good at. Stop wasting our (and your own) time and money, get the country fibered up (to the premises, not the cabinet) and become the fat pipe that we all want you to become...
only my 2 pence worth... Let the flaming commence :)
Vic
"UK ISP BT" is pretty unambiguous. The first acronym is known world wide, the second by everyone that uses /., and the third can be inferred by the first two.
Is "US ISP AT&T" also a problem? - but yeah, i'd have worded it differently.
Sent from my PDP-11
Maybe they could use this to fund a proper broadband service. As of last year (which is when I switched to Be There), their upstream sync rate was 448kbs, irrespective of line capabilities - anybody know if it's changed? Totally pathetic. They had the cheek to tell me when I asked for the Migration Access Code for my switch to BE that I was wrong and that BE had mislead me when they claimed I would get higher speeds with them. Of course, my line is syncing three times faster upstream now as BE offer up to the full 2.5mbs of ADSL2+. Why are people still wasting their time with BT? Now if only Ofcom would force BT to allow data without voice service instead of forcing one to pay for that too... /rant
At least my ISP uses its money to try to ensure that they are never the bottleneck on the circuit, rather than subsidising someone's music downloads...
It will be a steaming pile of crap.
1) They've been trying to bill my firm for a couple of years. They've screwed up the bill each time, and the mailing list of people involved in this rather simple task grew to over 50.
2) We've been quoted 69 days to get a line into an office. That's just the quote. It's now been about 4 months.
3) I tried to pay my final bill for my landline at home, telling them I'd left the country. It turns out they aren't able to send the final bill to other countries. The lady on the phone basically said they'd send the bill to the vacant flat, and we could as well ignore it.
I've never seen this many staff and man-hours spent on doing anything so badly, ever.
Usually, when sitting having a chat, and someone asks us the utterly boorish "my internet seems to be running slow"; One of the first pieces of advice we give to people to speed up their net is to ditch BT broadband. BT's infrastructure is old, poorly designed, and managed on the cheap. Their consumer grade equipment (Home Hub - Business Hub) uses poor quality electronics and software making it almost unusable. (I have yet to meet someone with a working set of "Hub Phones")
Their phone line instillation service is woeful. Younger engineers are poorly paid and badly trained - creating birds nests of redundant wiring inside their junction boxes, degrading an ADSL signal to the point dial-up seems a realistic alternative. Even an experienced engineer is given such a busy schedule they have no choice but to cut corners.
The poorly installed phone line and slow internet service is not what pushes customers over the edge - its the customer service. A phone call to BTs technical support regarding a cable fault will most probably (worked out mathematically from the many service calls I have endured) be routed through to billing - who will tell you that booking another engineer cannot be sent because there is something amiss with their system. They will tell you this without apology - in a tone of voice suggesting it is you'r fault their system does not work.
Of course... BT are always adding value to their products - BT vision for example. An innovative service where you pay BT to stream channels free on digital TV to a set top box (over your internet connection using bandwidth you pay for). Even their own websites suggests that you could get every channel available on free-view, 20Mb download bandwidth (less whatever BT vision uses), with unlimited usage, a Free BT-Vision set top box, and even a £25 Amazon gift certificate. All this for just 40 pounds per month! With an extra £10 per month line rental. And an instillation fee for the BT Vision Box.
Rant over - point is BT could, and most likely will, provide a music service, and most likely will employ traffic shaping. It most likeley be woeful when compared to the likes of spotify or any other current provider. Chances are if you use BT broadband your internet connection will be so poor you wont be able to notice traffic shaping. Only a lunatic would actually buy an internet based service from BT - when they can barely provide an internet service. They obviously have no interest in providing a good quality telephony product, or internet product. Eventually, these sorts of rants will be repeated on /. posted to an article explaining how BT went bankrupt.
Instead of wasting resources on creating yet another music service, they could have worked with existing music services to expand/improve their services (such as Napster, Amazon, etc), and cut their customers a deal if they wanted the service as an incentive to be a BT customer. I think they should be spending more of their resources upgrading the dire UK telecoms infrastructure. I'm not bitter at all with my paltry 1.3Mbps connection...
Any P2P veteran knows that you can download a lot of data in 6 months, in fact I am pretty sure my internet connection would take all of 20 hours to download all the music I have ever possessed. Mind you I am not with BT. This service would in fact be ideal for me as I never listen to new music anyway. I think that recorded music is like whiskey: it has to be 12 years old or it is not ready to consume. You could even set up a script to attempt to scrape the entire collection they were offering and just not bother saving any of the data. That way BT would have an official record of you owning a personal license to all their music meaning you could no longer be prosecuted for pirating it from anywhere later. That is assuming they even have a decent selection.
I worked for BT too.. What were they good at? :)
Danish ISP TDC launched its music service "PLAY" three years ago. All subscribers have access to 10+ million songs on their PCs or phones, completely free of charge (subscription costs are the same as before it was launched.
It's be a huge success and widely praised, it wouldn't surprise me if they hit over 500 million downloads by the end of 2011, pretty good for a country of ~6 million.
Eat the rich.