Container for all companies
Universal, the planet’s biggest music corporation, has told Apple that it won’t be renewing its annual contract to sell music through iTunes.
According to an anonymous executive cited in the New York Times, the mighty Universal Music Group of Vivendi will now market music to Apple at will, leaving the company free to remove its songs from the iTunes service at short notice if pricing and terms can not be agreed.
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Music mega retailed HMV has announced that it will start selling “DRM-free” digital downloads from September 2007.
Over one million “DRM-free” tracks will be available for download at launch, including EMI’s full catalogue with big names like Coldplay, Lily Allen, Gorillaz and Robbie Williams.
They’ll also be existing content made available from other labels distributed by HMV’s digital partner, MusicNet, adding to the 3 million+ tracks already offered online by HMV.
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The most over-hyped event in the history of consumer electronics offered plenty of troubling insights into what happens when over-excited tech geeks come into contact with the object of their lust.
Starting with a mass public countdown on the street, the iPhone Launch TV channel coverage showed slavering first buyers for the iPhone gleefully charging into Apple’s New York Soho store and being treated like celebrities, with their every move being captured by banks of photographers and cameraman.
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We’ll be sooooooooo glad when today is over. This blessed iPhone launch is just getting totally out of control.
The latest daft part of the over-coverage is that Mogulus, providers of online video tools, are running a dedicated iPhone Launch TV channel.
Watch it after the jump
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Everyone’s favourite games console manufacturer (except Sony, perhaps), is opening up another channel of content for its Wii.
Nintendo have announced WiiWare, letting people purchase and download original games software.
Nintendo have offered a service to download reworked classic games – Super Mario Bros, etc – to the Wii since last November. Indeed, earlier this month they announced that 4.7m of these classic games had been downloaded already.
WiiWare will attempt to get legions of small software developers to create compelling, less-expansive games, without them having to be concerned with the hassle and cost of creating games on disk.
Nintendo expect the first WiiWare content to arrive early 2008 – so coders, get coding!
Virgin Media tell us that they “will be the first” TV service to offer the BBC iPlayer service through their STB and remote control – rather than through a computer.
Following yesterday’s Official launch of the BBC iPlayer, we thought this would of interest to follow up.
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On the eve of the most hysterical launch known to mankind – the Apple iPhone (exceeding even the heavily spent-on Windows XP launch), we have an exclusive the Apple iPhone II.
I know it sounds crazy, but we just stumbled over it while at the RCA 2007 show.
While looking at the work of Alan Outten, we came across one of his projects, No Robots Please!
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This morning, BBC boss Mark Thompson announced that the corporation’s long-awaited iPlayer on-demand TV service would launch, as an open public beta, on 27 July this year.
Unveiling details of the peer-to-peer download service, Thompson predicted that the iPlayer (nee iMP) would be “at least as big a redefinition of broadcast TV as colour TV was 40 years ago.”
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Nintendo’s stock market valuation was briefly higher than Sony’s on the Osaka Stock Exchange this morning.
The combination of a record high for Nintendo’s share price and a drop for Sony lead to the strange situation.
Nintendo’s revenue is eight times smaller than Sony – not surprising when Sony’s empire spans so many different areas including, TV, music and film publishing.
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Yahoo has announced that it is going to shake up the structure of their advertising departments, merging its web search and display advertising.
Executive vice president of global sales at Yahoo, Gregory Coleman (pictured), was on hand to deliver the follow wise words, “When combined, the two organisations will deliver profoundly better results than when delivered separately.”