A new advertising-supporting free music website has won the backing of Universal Music Group, creating a new model that could challenge market leader Apple Computer’s iTunes Music Store.

New York-based SpiralFrog, which plans to launch its service later this year, said French-based Vivendi unit Universal, the world’s largest music label, agreed to make its library available for the service to US and Canadian customers.
The site appeared to be the first to offer legal music downloads for free to customers willing to watch online ads. The inclusion of the biggest of the Big Four music labels will give SpiralFrog an edge with consumers.
The move has the potential to shake up the online music sector, dominated by Apple Computer’s iTunes Music Store, whose marketing of 99-cent song downloads has become a model used by rivals.
“I think this is a significant development,” said Phil Leigh, a senior analyst at the research firm Inside Digital Media, who predicted the model will work.
“Youthful consumers are moving to the Internet, so the way to popularize music is on the Internet, and you have to be able to make it available for free.”
Leigh said the market has the potential to generate revenues in the same manner as radio.
“The US radio industry generates 20 billion dollars a year in revenue and they give the product away for free,” he said. “Record labels generate 12 billion dollars a year and they sell their product.”
SpiralFrog chief executive Robin Kent, a former advertising executive, said the service will offer an alternative to the pay-per-song model as well as the widely used practice of illicit file-swapping.
“Offering young consumers an easy-to-use alternative to pirated music sites will be compelling,” said Kent.
Kent said the website will offer high-quality legal downloads with protection against viruses and spyware.
It will have built-in digital rights management technology to prevent illegal copies of the downloaded songs.
A Universal spokesman who asked not to be named said the new service is among several online ventures being supported by the music giant.
“We support any model that will help offer digital music to consumers in an exciting and legitimate way,” the spokesman said.
A spokesman for EMI said the British-based music giant is “open to any kind of model that is consumer friendly and creates another way to download digital music.”
An industry source said EMI was in negotiations with SpiralFrog and other groups that may be launching ad-supported music websites.
Although surveys show many consumers still use file-sharing sites to swap pirated music, the market for legal online music has soared with the advent of iTunes and others, and the crackdown in the United States and other countries on piracy.
Surveys indicate iTunes holds more than 80 percent of the US market for music downloads and strong positions in other countries where it operates.
Apple’s iPod — which is the only player compatible with iTunes music — holds about 75 percent of the US market for music players.
Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Jupiter Research, said the move to an ad-supported model had been expected.
“This is innovative but not entirely new — it is part of a broader development of the music industry becoming more experimental and broad-minded with digital music,” Mulligan said.
“Developing ad-supported free music services is actually something we have been telling the music industry they should do for some time now.”
The analyst said this model appears to be a way to woo young music fans who are unwilling to pay for downloads and might otherwise use file-sharing sites.
“Will the SpiralFrog service work? That all depends on whether they can get the right content and grow a good audience,” he said.
“Advertisers buy access to audiences. Without a good audience there wont be an appealing proposition for advertisers which means no viable business model.”

Download Xilisoft PSP Video Converter and install it.

Run PSP Video Converter first, load the file(s) by clicking the “Add” button in the main interface or choose “Add” in the File menu.

Highlight the file you want to convert, informations of the file will be shown in the recording area. You can preview the file in the left preview window.

Highlight the loaded file and choose output format from “Profile” combo-box. Here, you must select “PSP Video Format (.mp4)” for your PSP.

Click “Browse…” button to select folder or entering the path directly to decide where to save the output file; “C:\temp” is the default one.

Click “Encode” to start converting. After the conversion is done, there will be two output files for each single loaded file. One is the .MP4 video file, playable with QuickTime on PC, another is a .THM file. Both of them are necessary for PSP. The two files are in the same main title, for example, if your original file is “test.avi”, after the conversion, you will get two files: “test.mp4″ and “test.thm”.

Connect your PSP with PC, and copy those two files into “H:\MP_ROOT\100MNV01″ (where “H” is the drive letter of your PSP).

Re-name your files in PSP. You must re-name them to “M4Vxxxxx.MP4″. There would be five random numbers followed “M4V” and the two letters should be capital. The numbers must be same for two files. This is quite important, or your file can not be played on PSP.

As the PSP storms the market there is increasing concern as to what will happen to all those movies that were stored in various formats. Since PSP supports only mp4, if you have movies stored in other formats, you got to change them into mp4. So if you have a DivX file you have to convert the DivX to mp4. Thankfully with the advent of new technology and new devices, new software has also hit the market which allows you to convert DivX to mp4. So now you have the option of playing the previous formats stored in either CDs or DVDs in your DVD player, and at the same time you can use the mp4 format for your PSP device.

When choosing a software for the conversion of DivX to mp4 have an idea as to what you need. It will be better to opt for a software like Xilisoft PSP Converter as the options it provides are numerous and you can convert any of the following DVD, VCD, AVI, MPEG, GIF, Flash, WMV, WMA, WAV, MP3, MP4, M4A, OGG, AAC to mp4. It makes sense that you download a trial version before you buy the full version. It comes with limited usage but you can at least get the hang of it.

However before buying the software make sure your system supports the following hardware requirements.

Operating System – Windows 98 or higher
CPU – Pentium II 300 MMX or equivalent as a minimum
DVD Drive – DVD-R(W)/+R(W) Drive
Memory (RAM) – minimum 64meg memory
Hard Drive – minimum 4 GB, ideally 8GB of free space in a drive partition
Sony Memory Stick – At least a 512 MB Pro Duo Card. For 5-10 min movies 32MB card will do
USB Cable – PSP USB Cable

If you are using the trial version you can only convert the first 5 minutes of a movie. To convert entire movies you will have to get the full version.

Web video sensation YouTube.com, which serves up more than 100 million videos online a day, suffered a six-hour breakdown overnight – its first-ever unplanned outage, a company spokeswoman confirmed.

The news coincided with reports that YouTube is in talks with record labels to post thousands of free music videos online, aiming to move beyond being a site for sharing home videos to a provider of mainstream entertainment like Yahoo and others.

Access to the YouTube site was cut off around midnight in Australia and was only restored around 6:30am, or six hours later, according to a spokeswoman.

“We are experiencing a temporary site outage due to a database-related issue,” YouTube said in an e-mail to Reuters five hours after the outage began.

“To clarify and ensure accuracy, the site is not down for maintenance,” spokeswoman Julie Supan said in a statement released shortly before the site recovered. “This was an unplanned outage.”

YouTube, which sprung out of nowhere a year ago to now claim over 100 millions views a day, also said on Tuesday it was negotiating for rights to post current and archive music videos on its site, and said any commercial model it decides on will offer the videos free.

“What we really want to do is in six to 12 months, maybe 18 months, to have every music video ever created up on YouTube,” co-founder Steve Chen told Reuters. “We’re trying to bring in as much of this content as we can on to the site.”

He said YouTube intends to differentiate itself from pay-to-view or download services like Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes and Time Warner’s AOL Music, or others like Yahoo’s Yahoo Music, which is supported by an advertising revenue share model with record labels.

San Mateo, California-based YouTube says its videos account for 60 percent of all videos watched online. The site specializes in short, homemade, comic clips created by users.

The start-up plans to integrate the record companies’ videos into the community features of its site, allowing users to add the videos to their own profiles and post reviews like on Amazon.com and RealNetworks’ Rhapsody.

Its business model is being developed in tandem with all the major record labels, YouTube said, but did not give any names. Warner Music Group Corp and EMI confirmed to Reuters that they have been in discussions with YouTube.

“Yahoo Launch is almost an exact parallel of MTV but viewed through a web browser,” Chen said. “We add the whole user community feel, with 100 million views every day and user-generated content.”

Getting the record labels to agree to a business model is crucial as YouTube has run into trouble in the past when users posted copyrighted videos from television shows.

In March, the San Mateo, California start-up was asked by television broadcaster NBC to remove clips of the popular “Lazy Sunday” hip-hop spoof, which was originally broadcast on “Saturday Night Live.”

However, that order by NBC, whose parent NBC Universal is a unit of General Electric, was a precursor to a promotional partnership with YouTube a few months later in June. YouTube says its policy is to take down pirated content from the site as soon as it is aware of it.

“Right now we’re trying to very quickly determine how and what the model is to distribute this content and we’re very aggressive in assisting the labels in trying to get the content on to YouTube,” Chen added.

Warner Music and EMI said they are each trying to work out a business model with YouTube. Other major record companies including Universal Music and Sony BMG could not be reached for immediate comment.

“We’re obviously interested in legitimate use scenarios and trying to broaden those, and our focus with YouTube is how to be partners while protecting our artists and ensuring they get paid,” said Michael Nash, senior vice-president of digital and business development at Warner Music.

Internet audience measurement firm comScore Networks on Tuesday released data showing how YouTube surged into the No. 40 ranking in July among US Web sites, with 16 million visitors, up 20 percent just since June.

Reuters

The Seattle Podcasting Network is giving away a RANE MP4 Audio Mixer as part of its 2006 Passionate Podcaster contest.

Seattle, WA (PRWEB) July 15th, 2006 — The Seattle Podcasting Network is proud to recognize podcasters via the 2006 Passionate Podcaster contest. Podcasters from all over the world are invited to submit two of their programs to be evaluated on energy, creativity, and originality. The winner of the contest will receive an MP4 integrated high quality sound card and audio mixer (valued at $800) from Rane Corporation.

The Rane MP4 provides the convenience of playing digital music directly from your computer, mixing them with analog inputs (including a microphone) and sending the mixed signal back to the computer via USB. The MP4 allows for crossfading between two stereo sources with talk over capability. It features two-analog stereo Line/Phono inputs; two stereo inputs via the USB connection, an analog microphone input and one stereo digital audio output to USB. The MP4 allows easy mixing and recording of digital and analog inputs not readily available on software-only solutions. More information about the mixer is available at http://www.rane.com/mp4.html.

The contest is open for entries from July 15th through August 31st. To enter, podcasters should visit http://seattlepodcasting.net/ and click on the contest link to fill out the entry form. During the entry submission period, we’ll create and distribute two podcasts discussing the contest and the mixer and release them as part of the Seattle Podcasting Network’s official podcast. (Subscribe to our RSS feed at http://www.seattlepodcasting.net/?feed=rss2, or listen online at http://seattlepodcasting.net.) A winner will be announced on September 15th, 2006. Podcasters do not have to be located in Seattle to win.

The Seattle Podcasting Network is dedicated to bringing together and promoting Seattle-area podcasters, and to increasing the awareness and availability of podcasts for entertainment, information, and education. Established in March of 2005, the network has connected podcasters from around the Pacific Northwest through monthly events and online communication. Find our more about the Seattle Podcasting Network at http://seattlepodcasting.net.

Rane Corporation, founded and incorporated in 1981 and located in Mukilteo, WA, is an established innovator in providing problem-solving professional audio tools, affordably priced, with unequalled reliability. Visit Rane online at http://www.rane.com.

Sony announced a new instant-messaging handheld today, the Mylo (short for “my life online”). Aimed at “techno socialites,” the pocketable gadget surfs the Web, connects to IM networks, and makes Skype calls over Wi-Fi networks, but it isn’t a cell phone – and it doesn’t support AIM, the most popular instant-messaging system.

The Mylo connects to any Wi-Fi network using an 802.11b Wi-Fi radio supporting WEP and WPA encryption, so it should work even in for-pay hotspots. The rounded design has a vague flavor of PlayStation Portable to it, with a slide-down QWERTY keyboard, cursor pad, and 2.4-inch, 320-by-240 LCD screen. Coming in black and white versions, it’s about 4.8 by 2.5 by 0.96 inches.

Along with its communication features, the Mylo plays MP3, ATRAC, and both protected and unprotected WMA music files, and MP4 video files. The device’s 940MB of available memory is plenty for media, though you can also add a Memory Stick.