July 30, 2006
OMG Licensed P2P!!!
This week, Mashboxx announced a licensing deal with EMI. Over a year ago, it announced its first licensing deal with Sony. The service is still not even in its first beta. After many laudatory articles and nearly a year after a Snocap rep contacted me because I had called the P2P filtering and payment service “vapor” over at Paidcontent, Snocap’s announced its new Linx retail service. Yet, so far as I know, the P2P system still has not been implemented in a live service.
Meanwhile, Kazaa settled and will open up a new licensed service at a later time. Given the above, I bet Licensed Kazaa will launch some time in 2009.
Now that’s what I call progress.
(To be fair, the implementation of Linx here is actually kinda neat, and I’m all for rights aggregation of this sort. But it’s sad (and predictable) how slowly these licensed distribution services are being rolled out.)
Filed by Derek Slater at 6:16 pm under General news
3 Comments
I must say I’m not convinced this is a first step in the direction of licensed P2P. Look for instance at what happened with iMesh, which is also touted as a legit “P2P” service, while in fact it is a subscription service/music store with some filtered P2P freebies.
In the end, I think the big labels are only interested in P2P as a way to limit bandwidth costs (cfr. the recent Bittorrent/movie studios deals) – embracing P2P as a new distribution model would be way too threatening for their hit-focused business models.
I agree. My tone was sarcastic … at least that was the intention.
Gotcha 😉