Hollywood and Circuit City already tried this and failed miserably! Remember DIVX? DIVX was a failed attempt to come up with a new standard for DVD's after their was already a DVD standard with millions of players in place. DIVX disks looked like DVD's but could only be played on DIVX branded players. It basically was a Pay Per View model in that you "purchased" the physical DIVX disk, but had to pay for every 24 hour viewing period that unlocked it. If you did not pay your bill or disconnect your DIVX player from the phone line, All your titles were useless and had no value to anyone. The internet community and consumers alike have already voted un the "own vs rent" issue by rejecting DIVX.
If you could get high speed wireless internet access to your car anywhere, & you had a PC integrated, then maybe Yahoo is a better deal Over Sirius & XM. Problem is that there are NO head units that will play the Janus DRM'd WMA crap that Yahoo is flogging. Virtually everyone that subscribes to Satellite radio is primarily listening to it in a moving vehicle. It is a great solution for highway travel and for cities (ie. most) that have poor radio stations. Even if you batch downloaded a bunch of tracks from Yahoo music the night before your road trip, the DRM would prevent you from burning an MP3 CD or a regular CD that you could play in your car. The ONLY way your going to be able to play your Yahoo subscription music in your car is if you happen to own one of the handful of WMA portable players that carry the Microsoft Janus DRM and use a line level input or cheesy cassette/FM adaptor. I almost bought a XM tuner for my Alpine Head Unit here in Canada, but instead I bought a 60GB Ipod Photo with the Alpine Ipod connector kit. I now have access to all my music on my Ipod with full Head Unit Control. I can search by Artist, Playlist or Album and display all ID3 tag info all from the head unit in digital sound right from the Ipod which is locked safely away in my glove box. All my MP3's are 192K-320Kbps Variable Bit rate from tracks I own or download from Ubernet (www.ubernet.org). I refuse to be locked in to any service or have my music library obsoleted or deleted if my credit card should expire. The only guaranteed future proof (i.e. for the next 10 to 20 years) audio format is good old unprotected MP3. You can bet that any device that plays music will always play MP3 for the forseeable future.
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Hollywood and Circuit City already tried this and failed miserably! Remember DIVX? DIVX was a failed attempt to come up with a new standard for DVD's after their was already a DVD standard with millions of players in place. DIVX disks looked like DVD's but could only be played on DIVX branded players. It basically was a Pay Per View model in that you "purchased" the physical DIVX disk, but had to pay for every 24 hour viewing period that unlocked it. If you did not pay your bill or disconnect your DIVX player from the phone line, All your titles were useless and had no value to anyone. The internet community and consumers alike have already voted un the "own vs rent" issue by rejecting DIVX.
If you could get high speed wireless internet access to your car anywhere, & you had a PC integrated, then maybe Yahoo is a better deal Over Sirius & XM. Problem is that there are NO head units that will play the Janus DRM'd WMA crap that Yahoo is flogging. Virtually everyone that subscribes to Satellite radio is primarily listening to it in a moving vehicle. It is a great solution for highway travel and for cities (ie. most) that have poor radio stations. Even if you batch downloaded a bunch of tracks from Yahoo music the night before your road trip, the DRM would prevent you from burning an MP3 CD or a regular CD that you could play in your car. The ONLY way your going to be able to play your Yahoo subscription music in your car is if you happen to own one of the handful of WMA portable players that carry the Microsoft Janus DRM and use a line level input or cheesy cassette/FM adaptor. I almost bought a XM tuner for my Alpine Head Unit here in Canada, but instead I bought a 60GB Ipod Photo with the Alpine Ipod connector kit. I now have access to all my music on my Ipod with full Head Unit Control. I can search by Artist, Playlist or Album and display all ID3 tag info all from the head unit in digital sound right from the Ipod which is locked safely away in my glove box. All my MP3's are 192K-320Kbps Variable Bit rate from tracks I own or download from Ubernet (www.ubernet.org). I refuse to be locked in to any service or have my music library obsoleted or deleted if my credit card should expire. The only guaranteed future proof (i.e. for the next 10 to 20 years) audio format is good old unprotected MP3. You can bet that any device that plays music will always play MP3 for the forseeable future.