Spotify launches Apple iTunes ‘rival’
New application will synch tracks from computers to iPods, iPhones and Androids and allow users to buy MP3 bundles
If you hate using Apple’s iTunes to synchronise songs on your iPod or iPhone, the music streaming service Spotify would like your attention. It is rolling out a new version of its desktop and mobile application for all of its users, including the ad-supported “free” users, which will synchronise tracks from their computer to iPods, iPhones and Android phones.
It is also introducing its own music store, which will allow users to buy “bundles” to pay for MP3-encoded songs from the catalogue, in which buying a bigger bundle effectively gives a discount on the songs. Thus a “bundle” of 10 tracks costs £7.99, effectively costing 80p each, while a bundle of 100 costs £50.
The company says the synchronisation – which also works over Wi-Fi, something iTunes doesn’t do – has been the top most requested feature from its users for a considerable time. It has taken more than a year of programming to implement it, and led to other projects being put on hold while the engineers figured out the plumbing of the iPod to ensure seamless functioning.
While the new version will not completely replace iTunes for people with iPhone or iPod Touches – which will still need them for synchronising apps and doing software updates – and will also not change calendars, photos, videos or other content on lower-end iPods, chief product officer Gustav Soderstrom told the Guardian that Spotify saw it as important to reach more users of its free service. Premium users can already synchronise content from Spotify playlists on iPod Touches, iPhones and Android phones, but free users were limited to the desktop version.
“There are studies which say that the iPod is the biggest music device in terms of hours listened,” Soderstrom said. “Perhaps after the car, because people listen to a lot of radio in cars. But the iPod is certainly second, and the desktop comes a long way behind.” Spotify reckons that if it extends its functionality to the iPod, more people will eventually upgrade to its service.
The company said at the beginning of March it has a million subscribers and 10m registered users; no further update was provided this week.
There was also no announcement on when Spotify might reach the US: “We’re still working hard on that. We’re getting closer,” said a spokesman.
Asked how he thought Apple would react to the news, Soderstrom said he thought it would be happy: “They have encouraged third-party services through the App Store for the iPhone, iPod Touch and more recently the Mac platform. They believe that having a third-party ecosystem really drives hardware sales.”
In the past, Apple has blocked companies it thought were trying to unravel the digital protections around music on the iPod. But Soderstrom said Spotify is not doing that: it will not try to remove songs put on the device by iTunes, and will not try to synchronise DRM-protected songs, although he said that only a “small percentage” of people have such music. Apple stopped selling DRM-protected songs through its iTunes Music Store in January 2009, though some songs have not been updated.
The Spotify sync puts the music on the device a second time, though Soderstrom said that most Premium users remove the iTunes music and synchronise their playlists from Spotify directly.
At present Spotify can only synchronise “static” playlists from iTunes, and not “smart” playlists which are updated in iTunes when new songs are added to the library. Soderstrom said that functionality was being worked on both for synchronisation and for Spotify playlists generally.
• Amazon has cut the prices of MP3 downloads in the US, reducing them to 69 cents, compared to the .29 that some songs in Apple’s iTunes Store sell at. Amazon has about 10% of the music download market in the US but is now looking to expand.
Technology news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk
IE9 launches as Firefox and Chrome close gap
IE9 promises faster performance, HTML5 compatibility and enhanced privacy – but rival browsers and lack of XP compatibility may hinder takeup
Microsoft has launched IE9, the newest version of its web browser which it hopes will be able to rebuild market share lost to rivals such as Firefox and Google’s Chrome.
The program is available for download now.
However, IE9 will not be available for the millions of people still using Windows XP – which includes a very substantial number in the Far East who will have pirated copies of XP and are likely to be using outdated copies of IE6, which Microsoft is publicly asking people to stop using.
Windows XP is still the most widely used version of Windows, according to browser metrics data which suggests that it makes up 41% of machines accessing a variety of web pages, compared to 26% for Windows 7 and 14.5% for Vista – though their combined share is very slightly higher than that of XP.
IE9 only works on the newer Windows Vista and Windows 7. It marks Microsoft’s latest effort to reverse the trend in which users who download specific browsers, rather than using the defaults which come on their machines, are choosing the Mozilla and Google rivals, which now between them have more than 25% of browser market share according to NetMarketshare, which puts the newer IE8 at just under 35%, with IE6 on 11.3% and the now-deprecated IE7 on 8%. Apple’s Safari has just under 4%, which “other” browsers make up 15%; a number of those will re-use the layout engine of Internet Explorer on a PC.
Among the aspects that Microsoft is touting in the new browser are increased speed by using hardware acceleration from graphics cards, enhanced privacy via an anti-tracking feature, HTML5 and CSS3 support and faster Javascript performance: tests against WebKit’s SunSpider suggest it is now as fast as Chrome or Firefox.
The HTML5 support, along with a declararation earlier by Microsoft that it will not be including support for Google’s WebM video codec, seems to imply that Microsoft was aligning itself with Apple by backing the H.264 codec for video playback in HTML5.
A number of UK sites have worked with Microsoft to offer content that will be showcased in IE9, including the British Fashion Council, ESPN, Film4oD and Sky News. National Rail had built an HTML5 journey planner and departure board application which runs off the pinned icon on the taskbar.
In its beta phase IE9 was downloaded 40m times, and shows has having a 2% share on Windows 7 machines.
The company said ahead of the launch that IE9 does not include a security flaw from IE8 that was exploited at the recent Pwn2Own hacker conference, which allowed “remote code execution” – in effect, letting the user’s machine be taken over.
However Which? magazine says that users should be wary of the anti-tracking system, called Tracking Protection Lists (TPPLs), which blocks content, such as Flash cookies, web beacons (tiny 1×1 pixel “images” that link back to a server) and images, from tracking web browsing behaviour.
Which? found a flaw: “when a user has downloaded multiple TPLs, all of the rules from all of the TPLs are grouped together into a single list where an ‘allow’ takes precedence over a ‘block’. For example, a consumer may choose to install two TPLs: one by EasyList and one by TRUSTe. The EasyList TPL might ‘block’ web beacons, whereas the TRUSTe TPL might ‘allow’ them. In this case, the web beacons would be ‘allowed’.”
Dr Rob Reid, a senior Which? policy adviser, said: “We’re disappointed with the way these lists work, and feel consumers who install multiple lists could be left with a false sense of security.”
Meanwhile, Firefox is working through a series of betas of version 4, and earlier this month made the first “release candidate” available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux – and will be available for Windows XP.
Technology news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk
Ofcom launches second TalkTalk investigation
Inquiry follows claims company mis-sold phone service and switched some internet users to its service without their consent
The UK’s second-largest broadband provider, TalkTalk, is facing a fresh investigation by Ofcom into claims it switched internet users to its service without their consent.
Ofcom launched the investigation, its second into TalkTalk this year, after complaints from the public. Earlier this month Ofcom ruled that the internet service provider breached telecoms regulations when it charged customers for cancelled services.
The media regulator’s investigation, announced late on Monday, follows claims that TalkTalk mis-sold its fixed-line telephone services and switched some internet users to its service without their consent.
TalkTalk could face a financial penalty of up to 10% of relevant turnover if it is judged to have breached telecoms regulations.
The company said it was fully co-operating with the Ofcom and that it will continue to “review [its] sales processes and take any potential issues of mis-selling extremely seriously”.
More than 1,000 complaints have been received by Ofcom about TalkTalk this year, with most understood to be from customers wrongly charged for cancelled services.
Earlier this month Ofcom ordered TalkTalk and Tiscali, both part of TalkTalk Group, to comply with regulations by 2 December or face further enforcement action, including a possible financial penalty.
The internet service providers, which have a combined UK market share for fixed-line broadband of 22.8%, were found to have been charging customers hundreds of pounds for cancelled services. In some cases the companies issued warnings over unpaid bills years after customers’ accounts were closed.
Ofcom ordered the two firms to pay back customers’ legal costs where proceedings had begun. They must also repair credit ratings of affected customers.
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Technology news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk
HTML5 version of YouTube launches for mobiles
The move will speed up access for people using the site via iPhones or Android
Mobile users in the UK, Europe and Middle East can now access an HTML5 version of Google’s YouTube video site, speeding up access for those accessing it via iPhones, Android or other mobile devices with browsers able to render HTML5 video content.
The launch comes as mobile use of the web is growing rapidly: Google says that YouTube’s mobile site, m.youtube.com, gets more than 100m video playbacks a day – roughly the number of daily views youtube.com was getting when being acquired by Google in 2006 – and every minute an hour of video is uploaded to the site from a mobile device. Mobile video playback also grew by 160% in 2009 on the previous year, along with an increase in adoption of devices able to stream video.
The US version of the HTML5 site for mobiles was launched last month.
Across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the UK consumes the most YouTube videos on mobile devices, followed by France, Italy, Netherlands and Switzerland.
The original mobile version of YouTube launched in 2007, but relied on versions of Adobe’s Flash for playback – which was too taxing for most devices. Since then, the development of the HTML5 web standard, and of mobile browsers – notably WebKit, used by Apple in the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, and by Google in Android – able to play back embedded video content using the H.264 codec, rather than Flash’s usual Sorensen or VP6 codecs, has meant that HTML5 video use has become feasible.
Google says the decision has been driven by the dramatic growth in mobile access to YouTube, which is more than doubling every year.
Several short-form video sites are building players in HTML5: Vimeo brought out a hybrid HTML5 version of its player earlier this month, designed for better mobile playback. But when US-only TV and movie streaming site Hulu unveiled a major revamp of its display earlier this year, it did so using Adobe Flash, saying HTML5 “doesn’t meet our customers’ needs”.
The use of HTML5 does not mean that Flash is shut out of YouTube’s mobile version: Adobe’s product can encode video in H.264 as well. But the growing use of desktop browsers such as Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari, which can render H.264 video – and with the forthcoming Internet Explorer 9 also offering it – poses a long-term question about Flash’s continued widespread use.
Brightcove, the video hosting service for many media organisations, began offering an HTML5 version of its site in March this year. The New York Times and Time Inc were among the first media outlets to integrate it – allowing playback on Apple’s popular mobile devices, which do not use Flash.
Closer to home, Erik Huggers, director of BBC future media & technology, recently defended the corporation from accusations that its widespread use of Flash – on the iPlayer, in particular – betrayed a commitment to open standards.
“Our use of Flash is not a case of BBC favouritism, rather it currently happens to be the most efficient way to deliver a high quality experience to the broadest possible audience,” Huggers said, adding: “The fact is that there’s still a lot of work to be done on HTML5 before we can integrate it fully into our products. As things stand I have concerns about HTML5′s ability to deliver on the vision of a single open browser standard which goes beyond the whole debate around video playback.”
Though the BBC does deliver H.264-encoded video to Apple mobile devices, it does not do that for Android devices, citing concerns about copying of content via the Android platform, and instead serves Flash-based video to them.
However YouTube has said that HTML5 is still some way from becoming the new standard for streaming long-form video content, such as BBC iPlayer content. “While HTML5′s video support enables us to bring most of the content and features of YouTube to computers and other devices that don’t support Flash Player, it does not yet meet all of our needs,” said John Hardin, software engineer at YouTube, in a blogpost published in June. “Today, Adobe Flash provides the best platform for YouTube’s video distribution requirements, which is why our primary video player is built with it.”
Microsoft has put its eggs in the HTML5 basket with next year’s release of its internet Explorer 9 browser. Ryan Gavin, Microsoft’s senior director of internet Explorer, said in May this year: “We’re all in on HTML5. We’ve been co-chairing the HTML5 working group, and we’re actually leading the HTML5 testing group.”
