UK music giant HMV has announced their online music offering. Going live some time in September, the £4.99 you pay will give you 100 credits which can be spent on streaming (1 credit), temporarily downloading for a month (10 credits) or burning to CD (100 credits). It’s not clear how much of the past and current catalogues will be available.

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RealNetworks and one of their content partners, FoxSports.com are going to be offering subscribers to RealOne SuperPass the opportunity to watch something called the Big 12 Conference. I’ve no idea of what this means but it looks like it might be college games, which I assume is great for watching for the ‘next big thing’ in US football.

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Microsoft has announced the finalised US release date of its new “online, broadband, multi-player” service for Xbox – Xbox Live, to be 15 Nov. It will retail in shops for around $50 including a years worth of subscription, a headset (enabling players to talk/insult fellow players) and a mini-game.

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In a Napster-like world, people had been used to totally unrestricted access to whatever music they wanted and the freedom to do what they wanted with it away from their PC’s. You can obviously argue that the general public shouldn’t have ever been exposed to such freedom, but nothing can change the fact that some of them were.

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In an interesting new dimension to the RIAA-induced fees for Internet radio story, Artemis Records have announced the creation of a licence allowing Internet radio stations to use any of their artists tracks for a year without the need to pay a fee.

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There was some significant news at the end of last week that will affect/restrict the breadth of music you can listen in the future.

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RealNetworks yesterday opened the European version of their paid-for content network, RealOne SuperPass. The US equivalent, launched in December 2001, has become a significant contributer to their income.

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You may remember Movie88.com from last year, you could log on to the Taiwan-based site and play complete Hollywood movies for around US$1. The Hollywood studios got upset about this and leaned heavily on the Taiwanese Government to get them shut down, which the were successful in doing in February this year.

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I’ve written here in glowing terms about the theory and features of the Moxi Media Centre. Back in March Diego bought Moxi and they’ve now reported receiving a positive from the cable industry at the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) annual tradeshow in New Orleans. Motorola showed their Moxi based “Broadband Media Center’s”, the BMC8000 and 9000, which they are building under license.

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During the inevitable press build up to the release of the new Star Wars film “Attack of the Clones”, there are two interesting news items doing the rounds.

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