in Dalton Caldwell's startup school talk, he said he was familiar with some of the people from the LaLa acquisition. he said he was pretty sure they weren't working on anything similar to what they had been doing in their old company. if true, then Apple isn't working on a streaming service after all.
I find that hard to believe. As the 800lb gorilla in online music I'm absolutely certain they could hammer out a streaming deal with the contacts they already have.
The only thing to stop streaming getting into iTunes is boss Jobs himself.
Everything I've read has indicated that Lala's contracts with the music industry were non-transferable and would be dissolved upon Lala's sale or acquisition.
Which is one thing Dalton Caldwell explained at Startup School: a music startup either doesn't have deals in place and is thus not a good acquisition target; or does have deals in place and is still not a good acquisition target because deals are usually not transferable upon acquisition.
It was a music player. Now it's a music, video, book, and app store and media center, as well as a connection hub for all of your accessory devices. I have a feeling that whatever they announce tomorrow will only be a proliferation of this trend.
"iTunes" has got a ton of brand awareness, but we've seen them appropriately drop "Computer" from their company name and "Phone" from iOS. Still, probably a long shot.
I don't care what it's called, I dream of termination with extreme prejudice of the Carbon based, kruft-filled, all-in-one, un-Apple, sync-nightmare currently called iTunes.
I think I might be the only person on HN who actually luv- luv- luvs iTunes, and I say this as someone who once wrote his own MP3 player interface out of extreme music-player-fussiness. The "kruft" ship sailed the minute I downloaded Firefox.
Nope, not the only one. I don’t use an iPod, or an iPhone, or an TV, but I think iTunes is wonderful as a PC music player. It beats the pants off everything that came before (remember all those music player apps whose selling point was that they had pretty, customizable “skins”?), and hasn’t really been challenged by anything since.
For all the talk of bloat, the changes and additions over the last few years to the main functionality have been quite restrained and user-focused: sorting by album by artist, adding a “sort by” metadata field, improving the organization of playlists, “smart” playlists, and playlist folders, views organized by album art rather than text, improvements to the column browser, &c. Even what I would call “bloaty” features like the “genius playlist” and “ping” can be easily turned off.
Agreed: most of the things I don't like about it are things that I don't think can be solved just by improvements to the iTunes app but by moving to a more cloud-based system.
> sorting by album by artist, adding a “sort by” metadata field, improving the organization of playlists, “smart” playlists, and playlist folders, views organized by album art rather than text, improvements to the column browser, &c
I don't know enough about the history of music players to say whether iTunes created those innovations (though I'd be surprised, except for the album art one), I can say for sure most any other media player these days will do those. And while the bloat can be turned off, I still found it to be have ridiculous start up time on Windows. It would take 10+ seconds just to open. I've said this on HNs before, but switching from iTunes to foobar2000 was by far the best software decision I've made, perhaps just barely behind switching from IE to Firefox. For the longest time I just took it for granted that iTunes was the best music player, but when I looked at the alternatives (pre-update Amarok, foobar2000, etc), I really found iTunes was a lot worse than I thought it was. The only feature I've come to miss are smart playlists, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a foobar plugin for them.
What I like about iTunes is that, in one window, it shows me all of my music in a way that is clean, consistent, and very easy to navigate. At least for my own usage patterns, the “one big window with an effective search box” display is just what I want. If it takes 10 seconds to start (as it does on my laptop), that’s frankly not a problem, as I just leave it open all the time; it doesn’t take any CPU to speak of when it’s not actively playing music.
At the risk of this topic being hijacked by an iTunes-as-music-player debate, one cannot (with a straight face) compare iTunes on Windows to Winamp. I'll grant you that iTunes may be the bee's knees on OSX, but on Windows it is a dog.
I'm a fan of the way it exposes and emphasizes metadata. And it's smart playlists are awesome. Really, it's just a great organizational tool (for music). And it starts up pretty quickly on my mac (so it doesn't feel crufty).
I like some things (Genius, the smart playlists, podcasts), am indifferent to a large swath of others (the store, video, radio, DJ, home sharing, library sharing, visualization) and am brought to a white-hot nun-punching rage by the (finite but unbounded) set of bugs, warts and misfeatures.
Why can't I have my view settings sticky across all the various views? Why do you INSIST on showing me the utterly useless genres by default? Why, in list mode, when reverse sorting an album by year (to, say, play your Cows collection from most recent to oldest) it reverses the track ordering? That last one, by the way, is marked "Works as Expected". Works as expected.
See, I use "Genre" as a free-form tagging field, for metadata that has no other home. Therefore, they are unique per artist (for the most part) and serve no useful purpose in browsing. So I never want them in my browser; I can set this for the main library, but the values are not inherited. It's like the iTunes team looked at the Finder and said .... "hmmm".
It'd be a misuse of wherever I put the info. The metadata I want to preserve about my music collection is a superset of the metadata that iTunes provides for.
They may do this, but it likely wouldn't be so soon after the iTunes icon change a few months ago- If they were going to drop the brand, they would have done so then.. Or at least not gone through the effort to rebrand.
They could be moving to a new generic name "iWhatever" where there are several subsections each represented with a colored circle and an icon inside. e.g. Blue Circle iTunes, iBooks is an orange circle with a book symbol, etc.
Imagine these icons running vertically down the side of the new "iWhatever" client similar to the way they made the "Maximize/Minimize/Close" buttons vertical in the latest rev.
This would actually be very similar to what Adobe did after it acquired Macromedia and faced the similar problem of having a jumble of apps that worked together, but lacked consistent branding and structure. They assigned everything a color and a "Periodic Table" naming convention which cohesively tied their products together.
However, the new icon is still a prominent music note. I would imagine they would require another icon change to signify that any iTunes name change isn't centered around music and audio.
This must either be syncing devices over the air or a music subscription service. I think the "never forget" part is important. You will "never forget" to sync your device, ever again. Your computer will "never forget" your music, because it's stored in the cloud.
Being forced to use iTunes to sync Music, Podcasts and Audiobooks (and play position!) is the most ridiculous and non-Apple user experience I've ever seen of any Apple product.
It gets especially bad once you add multiple iDevices and use them for the same purpose over different time spans.
Example: If I get home and want to continue listening to the current podcast on the iPad, I have to first sync my iPhone and then the iPad.
And if, on the next day, I want to finish the podcast on the iPhone, I have to remember to sync both devices again (iPad first) or I'll have to use the awful time slider on the iPhone to find the correct play position again.
Same goes for Audiobooks where it's even worse due to their length and sometimes more monotonous content (makes it harder to find the correct play position, or might spoil the content if you are really unlucky and skip ahead too far).
And don't get me started about the fact that at least my iTunes install insists on either installing all new iPhone-apps on my iPad or deleting all apps I installed directly from the App Store on the device, depending on how the checkbox is set.
This ugly mess has to end.
It worked "ok" (wireless podcast sync would always have been nice) while we had only one device. It became totally broken once we had multiple devices.
Yeah - what a luxury issue to have, but it's still totally non-apple and doesn't at all match their usually very slick user experience.
Worse, if I download podcasts on the phone from e.g. iTunes U, they tend to get removed when I sync. I like a lot of what iTunes does but the implementation (especially on Windows) has always been touch-and-go. I'm honestly not sure what their motivation would be to improve the product other than to add more potential revenue streams, but I'm glad that they may be trying.
... you do know that when you touch to 'grab' the nubbin, you can slide your finger down the face of the device a bit, and then when you slide left or right it scrubs more slowly, based on how far down the device you slid?
They demoed it quite prominently onstage when they introduced it, and the screen says "Hi-Speed Scrubbing" when you start scrubbing (and changes as you move down). It's not the most discoverable feature ever, but it's not a hidden Easter egg.
ITunes has a golden path of buy content through ITunes synch with one device(or at least one device per person). Pretty much any thing that deviates from this one use case is painful and annoying.
That's what I want. It doesn't even have to be cloud storage. I don't need my music in the cloud - I can sync that to the device directly.
But I want my internet connected mobile always-on device to be capable of a) checking for new podcast episodes over the air and b) wirelessly synchronizing the play position of various files across devices. Both operations are /trivial/.
I'm even willing to pay a small subscription fee for this.
I'm a really heavy podcast and audiobook listener. For me there is value in being able to come home, turning on my ipad and continuing to listen to my podcast where I left off on the iphone.
Or arriving at home and having the latest video podcasts already downloaded to the iPad without having to manually connect it to the PC (but after the iPhone or I'll lose the play position).
Or being able to listen to the newest episode of a podcast even though it came out after I left home.
That last one, I can already do in theory. It involves starting the itunes app on the iPhone and manually searching for the podcast, checking whether the latest episode has arrived.
Of course this is limited to podcasts actually on iTunes (no manual RSS download) and it sometimes seems to download the episode independently of the existing itunes subscription at which point I have two identical episodes the next time I connect the iPhone. No syncing of play position in that case.
What pains me the most is that I certainly have the ability to fix this on my own by writing my own podcast syncing code, but on a non-jailbroken device I don't get write-access to the itunes library and even if I could get it, it probably wouldn't sync back to the PC.
To use the common open source "I scratched an itch" metaphor: It's itching like mad, I have the ability to scratch and the needed tools, but no permission to actually do it and the itch scratching licensing board doesn't recognize my itch as something worthy of their scratching.
Maybe some chick will run in and throw a mallet at some Apple head regurgitating marketspeak. And then Richard Dreyfuss will tell us that 2010 won't be anything like the 2010 book. And then we can weep at the sorry state of technology and what passes as "unforgeable" nowadays.
People get much more excited about "mysterious" future news than they do about facts being revealed. The former lends itself to speculation that is almost always widely more awesome than the actual reveal turns out to be.
Indeed, and Apple are masters of the "hint, announce, release" process. With the right timing, and a rabid fanbase, the same product can easily dominate the news three times in a year.
I still don't understand why the Beatles being on iTunes is such a big deal. Anybody that cares about the Beatles already has their music, and it's already synced to their iDevice. At this point, it's nothing more than a business deal between Apple and the Beatles music label. Why should anybody else care?
I was thinking that it will be a Beatles announcement too. It seems like nobody will care, but at this point it has been scrutinized by so many folks that it has become a bigger deal.
Absolutely. And speaking as someone closer to fifty than forty... The Beatles are big news, but not new news. They aren't relevant to music distribution for the same reason that Miles Davis isn't relevant to music distribution. It's not like having The Beatles' catalog would get people to switch from iTunes to Zune or from Zune to iTunes.
Each country gets access to much much smaller down list of steams, movies, books, tunes and even apps versus the USA store. As a result many of us have to use a USA iTunes ID as well, which is painful as it means access to a US credit card with a US address, which is painful after 911 rules etc.
My hope would be a genuine merging of all of the country-nased iTunes store to create one world store. That may not be a big deal for US based customers, but an enormous deal for the rest of the world.
And it's not an 'event'. I bet it's about streaming, and the PR effort will be based in New York (convenient for the big labels?), rather than in California.
But there's no reason to time an announcement because of North Carolina.
NYC has big media companies and their CEOs, news media and their taping studios, and Wall Street.
North Carolina has a big building full of Apple's servers. (If it's even up and running yet.) You don't set the time for a press campaign based on a big building full of hardware.
Unless Jobs is going to be on streaming video giving a tour of the facility, say, like he did when they opened the first retail store - though that was a pre-recorded video, not live. So I wouldn't bet on this, but it seems like a possibility.
A store is someplace Apple needs people to visit, so it would make sense for Jobs to do something like that, to generate interest.
From the point of view of an iTunes user, the NC data center is irrelevant. It's a hidden implementation detail. The iTunes store could be running on a G4 Mac Cube under Steve Jobs' desk, for all it matters.
7AM in California? With no blogs saying that they've been invited to a special event? I'm skeptical it's something as major as a new subscription service for that reason.
On the other hand all the content on the apple.com homepage has been replaced by the announcement. This is something that Apple do only for big launches.
Since they've just released a new client, and people always eagerly scan the plist's looking for nuggets of information, I think it's safe to assume that it won't be anything client related (sorry, no WiFi syncing or cloud storage). So it's almost certainly Store related.
It's interesting that Japan get a clock (no Australia, which is a bigger market). Just last week Japan got the ability to purchase & rent movies, and that this announcement comes so soon after is probably not a coincidence. So something with the store, and something to do with movies.
Making this big a deal of an announcement, so close to the holiday season, makes me think that it's also something that is intended to give people a reason to buy Apple hardware.
Side note: Back when AppleTV2 was unveiled, Jobs said that you would be able to rent movies "day and date" with DVD releases. That hasn't been true to this point - embarrassingly Iron Man 2 which he demonstrated on stage wasn't available for rental until the DVD had been out for some time.
So I'm going to go with better movie rentals - earlier availability (perhaps much earlier, for a premium), possibly bundled movies, possibly the removal of the stupid contractual stuff where some movies become unrentable due to TV deals and hampers the library.
I'm sure Apple would love to give lots of families a reason to buy themselves an Apple TV's for Christmas this year, particularly with Boxee/Google now pushing into that market.
Though I doubt it would be possible because of licenses, (and also a relatively small number of people interested in that) the different clocks and the chosen time (which covers most of the world being awake) make me hope that they move to a somewhat global iTunes Store, where one can buy and gift music, apps, movies across country-specific stores.
Just last week, I couldn't gift an iPhone game to a friend because he wouldn't have been able to get it from his "local" store.
I thought Ping was writing on the wall that they were going to go start a streaming model, but I may be wrong. Alone, Ping sucks. It's a limited social site because you can't really access the music that you're friends are sharing. It's Spotify, Mog, Rdio, and Zune without the streaming service.
My guess is that they wanted to release streaming in September, but the labels weren't completely on board at that point. They needed something to show in the new iTunes, so they released Ping.
113 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] threadseriously, though, streaming is probably most likely, but i'm going to go with subscription service.
Apple already does DRM'd video streaming, and that's a much more difficult problem.
The only thing to stop streaming getting into iTunes is boss Jobs himself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSlHSq3cFAg
It was a music player. Now it's a music, video, book, and app store and media center, as well as a connection hub for all of your accessory devices. I have a feeling that whatever they announce tomorrow will only be a proliferation of this trend.
"iTunes" has got a ton of brand awareness, but we've seen them appropriately drop "Computer" from their company name and "Phone" from iOS. Still, probably a long shot.
For all the talk of bloat, the changes and additions over the last few years to the main functionality have been quite restrained and user-focused: sorting by album by artist, adding a “sort by” metadata field, improving the organization of playlists, “smart” playlists, and playlist folders, views organized by album art rather than text, improvements to the column browser, &c. Even what I would call “bloaty” features like the “genius playlist” and “ping” can be easily turned off.
I don't know enough about the history of music players to say whether iTunes created those innovations (though I'd be surprised, except for the album art one), I can say for sure most any other media player these days will do those. And while the bloat can be turned off, I still found it to be have ridiculous start up time on Windows. It would take 10+ seconds just to open. I've said this on HNs before, but switching from iTunes to foobar2000 was by far the best software decision I've made, perhaps just barely behind switching from IE to Firefox. For the longest time I just took it for granted that iTunes was the best music player, but when I looked at the alternatives (pre-update Amarok, foobar2000, etc), I really found iTunes was a lot worse than I thought it was. The only feature I've come to miss are smart playlists, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a foobar plugin for them.
What I like about iTunes is that, in one window, it shows me all of my music in a way that is clean, consistent, and very easy to navigate. At least for my own usage patterns, the “one big window with an effective search box” display is just what I want. If it takes 10 seconds to start (as it does on my laptop), that’s frankly not a problem, as I just leave it open all the time; it doesn’t take any CPU to speak of when it’s not actively playing music.
Why can't I have my view settings sticky across all the various views? Why do you INSIST on showing me the utterly useless genres by default? Why, in list mode, when reverse sorting an album by year (to, say, play your Cows collection from most recent to oldest) it reverses the track ordering? That last one, by the way, is marked "Works as Expected". Works as expected.
I wouldn't be surprised by anything.
Imagine these icons running vertically down the side of the new "iWhatever" client similar to the way they made the "Maximize/Minimize/Close" buttons vertical in the latest rev.
This would actually be very similar to what Adobe did after it acquired Macromedia and faced the similar problem of having a jumble of apps that worked together, but lacked consistent branding and structure. They assigned everything a color and a "Periodic Table" naming convention which cohesively tied their products together.
http://www.thehighcontrast.com/family-tree/
Another similarity is that most designers hated that change, just as they did the new iTunes icon!
I'll enjoy the fantasy for today at least.
It gets especially bad once you add multiple iDevices and use them for the same purpose over different time spans.
Example: If I get home and want to continue listening to the current podcast on the iPad, I have to first sync my iPhone and then the iPad.
And if, on the next day, I want to finish the podcast on the iPhone, I have to remember to sync both devices again (iPad first) or I'll have to use the awful time slider on the iPhone to find the correct play position again.
Same goes for Audiobooks where it's even worse due to their length and sometimes more monotonous content (makes it harder to find the correct play position, or might spoil the content if you are really unlucky and skip ahead too far).
And don't get me started about the fact that at least my iTunes install insists on either installing all new iPhone-apps on my iPad or deleting all apps I installed directly from the App Store on the device, depending on how the checkbox is set.
This ugly mess has to end.
It worked "ok" (wireless podcast sync would always have been nice) while we had only one device. It became totally broken once we had multiple devices.
Yeah - what a luxury issue to have, but it's still totally non-apple and doesn't at all match their usually very slick user experience.
awful? I think it's fairly clever, myself.
... you do know that when you touch to 'grab' the nubbin, you can slide your finger down the face of the device a bit, and then when you slide left or right it scrubs more slowly, based on how far down the device you slid?
Which makes me wonder if someone "stumbled" upon that, or there is a secret iPhone user's manual that only special people receive.
In hindsight, I think that a more "audio scrobber" motion, akin to the way the iPod wheel works, would have been a ton more intuitive.
Or are there issues with those services, too?
But I want my internet connected mobile always-on device to be capable of a) checking for new podcast episodes over the air and b) wirelessly synchronizing the play position of various files across devices. Both operations are /trivial/.
I'm even willing to pay a small subscription fee for this.
I'm a really heavy podcast and audiobook listener. For me there is value in being able to come home, turning on my ipad and continuing to listen to my podcast where I left off on the iphone.
Or arriving at home and having the latest video podcasts already downloaded to the iPad without having to manually connect it to the PC (but after the iPhone or I'll lose the play position).
Or being able to listen to the newest episode of a podcast even though it came out after I left home.
That last one, I can already do in theory. It involves starting the itunes app on the iPhone and manually searching for the podcast, checking whether the latest episode has arrived.
Of course this is limited to podcasts actually on iTunes (no manual RSS download) and it sometimes seems to download the episode independently of the existing itunes subscription at which point I have two identical episodes the next time I connect the iPhone. No syncing of play position in that case.
What pains me the most is that I certainly have the ability to fix this on my own by writing my own podcast syncing code, but on a non-jailbroken device I don't get write-access to the itunes library and even if I could get it, it probably wouldn't sync back to the PC.
To use the common open source "I scratched an itch" metaphor: It's itching like mad, I have the ability to scratch and the needed tools, but no permission to actually do it and the itch scratching licensing board doesn't recognize my itch as something worthy of their scratching.
This is infuriating.
I'm still flabbergasted that this is "front page news."
That would explain the Euro-friendly timing of the announcement (7 am California, 4 pm Paris).
And it's not an 'event'. I bet it's about streaming, and the PR effort will be based in New York (convenient for the big labels?), rather than in California.
NYC has big media companies and their CEOs, news media and their taping studios, and Wall Street.
North Carolina has a big building full of Apple's servers. (If it's even up and running yet.) You don't set the time for a press campaign based on a big building full of hardware.
From the point of view of an iTunes user, the NC data center is irrelevant. It's a hidden implementation detail. The iTunes store could be running on a G4 Mac Cube under Steve Jobs' desk, for all it matters.
That certainly would never be forgotten.
It's interesting that Japan get a clock (no Australia, which is a bigger market). Just last week Japan got the ability to purchase & rent movies, and that this announcement comes so soon after is probably not a coincidence. So something with the store, and something to do with movies.
Making this big a deal of an announcement, so close to the holiday season, makes me think that it's also something that is intended to give people a reason to buy Apple hardware.
Side note: Back when AppleTV2 was unveiled, Jobs said that you would be able to rent movies "day and date" with DVD releases. That hasn't been true to this point - embarrassingly Iron Man 2 which he demonstrated on stage wasn't available for rental until the DVD had been out for some time.
So I'm going to go with better movie rentals - earlier availability (perhaps much earlier, for a premium), possibly bundled movies, possibly the removal of the stupid contractual stuff where some movies become unrentable due to TV deals and hampers the library.
I'm sure Apple would love to give lots of families a reason to buy themselves an Apple TV's for Christmas this year, particularly with Boxee/Google now pushing into that market.
Just last week, I couldn't gift an iPhone game to a friend because he wouldn't have been able to get it from his "local" store.
The UK clock has me in agreement with you. Making the Apple TV a value proposition in the UK.
http://erictric.com/2010/11/15/itunes-live-stream-reference-...
My guess is that they wanted to release streaming in September, but the labels weren't completely on board at that point. They needed something to show in the new iTunes, so they released Ping.