by José Alvear
January 25, 2002
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Make Your Next Stereo Stream-Enabled
On Wednesday, iM Networks (www.imnetworks.com) announced a deal with Panasonic to license its Internet radio tuning solution. Panasonic said it would use iM Networks’ tuning on its new set top box to be available in Japan this fall. iM Networks selects hundreds of Internet radio stations covering a wide range of musical genres, and packages them to hardware manufacturers so they can be accessed from home Internet devices.
So far, the company has successfully licensed its Internet tuner to Philips, for use in its FW-i1000 mini-stereo system (selling for $499 at Amazon.com). Acer has also taken iM Networks’ basic hardware tuner and re-branded it under its own name, the iRhythm. The iRhythm is selling for just $59.99 at Amazon.com.
Philips also makes the Streamium MC-i200, a not-yet released mini-stereo system that plays CDs and regular radio, but also connects to home networks to play MP3s residing on your home computer. Philips has partnered with iM Networks, as well as AOL Music, MP3.com, Andante.com, MusicMatch and Radio Free Virgin for additional online content.
In the Money
In funding news, Intertainer (www.intertainer.tv) said it received $15 million in funding from electronics manufacturer Thomson and Microsoft. Previous investors included NBC, Intel, Sony and Qwest.
Intertainer says it has 70,000 hours of content from Hollywood studios like Universal, New Line Cinema, Warner Bros., Artisan Entertainment, Dreamworks as well as other name-brand TV and music content.
Intertainer subscribers pay $7.99 a month to get access to 700 hours of content, including new release films via pay per view that costs $3.99 for a 24 hour period. It sounds good, but the downside is that viewers must have broadband speeds of 580Kbps, which severely limits its audience size. Since Intertainer has branched out to 35 markets in the U.S., it hasn’t released how many subscribers or viewers it has.
The new round is important for Intertainer since it needs the money to continue operating. Streaming feature films at broadband speeds can really eat up cash reserves, even if viewers are paying for content.
Goings on at the ISMA
The Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA), a group promoting open standards such as MPEG-4, said this week that Network Appliance has joined the organization.
The addition of Network Appliance (www.networkappliance.com) adds another big name to the group. The ISMA was founded by Apple, Cisco, IBM, Kasenna, Philips and Sun Microsystems and features member companies like AOL Time Warner, Lucent, Hitachi, Inktomi, Sony, Thomson and many more. The two significant holdouts are RealNetworks and Microsoft, which, undoubtedly, are pushing their own proprietary systems. RealNetworks, however, now supports MPEG-4 via a player and server plug in from Envivio. At last month’s Streaming Media East show, Microsoft revealed that it was working on supporting RTSP, a protocol which can be used to deliver MPEG-4 content.
The ISMA’s next meeting will be on February 5 in New York City where companies will demonstrate media interoperability between member solutions. The group said that one of its goals for 2002 is to provide an interoperable environment for digital rights management (DRM).
Of Patents and Playlists
On Thursday, Loudeye (www.loudeye.com) announced that it received a patent for its system for “creating mass customized broadcasts for remote devices to generate individual playlists and target advertisements.”
In plain English, Loudeye has patented the system for making customized broadcasts to Internet-enabled remote devices, not the actual delivery to those devices. Loudeye says it is targeting music devices like Internet radio appliances, PDAs and cell phone applications.
