Terrestrial Radio Needs to Step It Up!

The radio industry has been in quite an uproar in the past ten years or so. Out of the sight-lines of most people, there has been a real struggle involving traditional "terrestrial" radio (which comes to you directly through the air to an old-fashioned AP or FM radio), satellite radio, and Internet radio. Each has its advantages and drawbacks; terrestrial radio is free and has the advantage of being local in scope (paradoxically, some stations have switched to a syndicated format with no local programming, giving up their biggest trump card over the others); satellite radio is available pretty much wherever you are for a monthly subscription fee which never changes, and there are a zillion channels to choose from; Internet radio offers even more stations than satellite, with the added benefit of being highly customizable (like Pandora or Songza).

Each of the three also has its drawbacks (terrestrial radio has a limited range, statellite radio requires the purchase of expensive equipment and has an ongoing subscription cost, Internet radio can be expensive based on your bandwidth usage and can be glitchy if you have a slow connection). Terrestrial radio stations have tried to fight back by broadcasting online in addition to their on-the-air signal; my guess is that this strategy meets with some degree of success, because these days it's not easy to find a terrestrial station which doesn't also have an online stream. But I think terrestrial radio stations are not doing everything they can to make technology work to their advantage.

For example: one of my cars has a radio that can display the name of the song you're listening to as it plays... if the radio station's transmitter is broadcasting that information. I'm amazed at the number of stations that either don't provide that information at all, or just continuously broadcast the station's call letters and station motto. Come on, people! This tech has been in place for years now! You KNOW you have this information. You've got a computer logging every song that is played anyway, and even if you don't, in this era when any smartphone with Soundhound or Shazam or Midomi or any number of other apps can instantly identify a song based on just a few seconds randomly selected from the middle of the song, there's no reason to not automatically provide that information to your listeners. And you don't even have to burn airtime having your DJ say the title. It's just THERE.

But if the terrestrial stations really want to keep people from heading to Best Buy and picking up that Sirius or XM box, I think there are things they could invest in as an industry that might keep people in their court.

I think every new automobile radio should have a GPS sensor in it. I don't think they should necessarily have navigation information built into them, but I think they should know where they are in the world. Why would this be useful in a radio? Because if you know where you are in the world, and you know what stations exist there, then you can provide a list of available stations to choose from. If there was a list that could be downloaded periodically, I'll bet people would go to the trouble to set it up. If you park your car in your garage and you have WiFi in your home, chances are your car could access that signal (maybe even using the car radio antenna!) and download. If you don't have a signal where you park but your cell phone has hotspot capability, you could use that to periodically update your list. Or you could park out in front of McDonald's or Starbuck's or somewhere else that has a free WiFi signal, and in a few seconds your list could be updated.

Or maybe there doesn't have to be a master list at all! It would be entirely possible for a radio, over time, to gauge the availability and strength of radio signals in places where the car goes, and build its own list over time. With digital memory as cheap as it is, you could store a great deal of information. Heck, it would even be possible to share that information with other radios nearby, so if you're sitting in a traffic jam or parking lot, your radio could be comparing notes with other radios about what frequencies are available where. You might find that you drive to a new place and your radio already knows what stations are there!

But let's back up even further. There are only a few places I frequent... I live in the Tulsa Oklahoma area, and my brother lives in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. Sometimes we drive to Oklahoma City, and I have family in Shreveport Louisiana. In each of those places I have stations I like to listen to, but I only have twelve or so radio presets to play with. Just my Tulsa stations fill up those buttons; when I visit my brother in DFW, I have to reprogram my radio presets. Why not have an arbitrary number of preset banks, which are sensitive to location? Why can't my radio show my Tulsa presets when I'm in Tulsa, and when I'm in Dallas, show me my favorite stations down there?

And let's go even one step further. In Tulsa, one of the stations I listen to has three separate frequencies that all broadcast the same programming. Depending on where you are in town, any one of the three might have a stronger signal than the others. Why shouldn't I be able to group the three so that, based either on my physical location or signal strength, the channel automatically changes to the best signal? And even better: that station is one of those local stations that is actually part of a national network. They just launched a frequency in Dallas. Why can't my button for them in Tulsa be the button for the same programming when I get to Dallas? Stations could provide a downloadable list of their own frequencies that could be used to program this new, cool, technology-enhanced terrestrial radio. Heck, stations could even provide an internal link to their Internet streams if they wanted, so Internet-capable radios would be able to switch to the online stream when they are out of range of the over-the-air signal. I think it would make sense for the terrestrial radio industry to invest actual money in developing these technologies, because when they become available, it will benefit them tremendously.

I won't even go into things like the possibility of the radio being able to make suggestions based on genre (rock, country, talk, etc.) because those capabilities are already out there in some existing radios. That technology suffers from the same problem the Song ID technology suffers from: stations don't always provide that information in their signals. I could also brainstorm from the perspective of the marketers: transmit the station or show's call-in number with the signal so your radio could dial your cell phone for you (there's a "distracted driving" case for the lawyers) or use the GPS capability to let you know when one of the station's advertisers is nearby. There are so many ways that car radios could be enhanced, it's kind of sad that in general, car radios still do basically the same thing they did in the 1970s when you knew what station you were on by looking at where the stick was over the list of numbers.

Terrestrial radio hasn't been making the effort to beat out their competitors in outer space and on the Internet. Many new car radios come with a line-in jack; mine doesn't, but I have a small FM transmitter that I can use to play music from my cell phone through my car radio. Even now, I can choose Internet radio over terrestrial if I like. As bandwidth continues to get cheaper and Internet music services continue to get better, traditional radio needs to step up its game, or it's nothing but downhill from here.


(Since I wrote this post, I've learned that 4G is coming soon to a car near you. Get on the ball, radio stations!)


I'm not a radio industry professional, and it's entirely possible that I've gotten some of my details wrong. Do you know something that contradicts the ideas I've presented here? Any more ideas that could be incorporated into car radio technology that would make listening to over-the-air radio easier or more enjoyable? Has the terrestrial radio industry made an effort to help technology along? Join the discussion below in the comments section!

Google Play Music: it's ALMOST there.

"Music in the Cloud." The phrase itself sounds sort of like "Pie in the Sky," doesn't it? Well, so far that's kind of been what cloud-based music has equated to. A year ago I blogged about this same thing, shortly after Amazon had released their music locker and many months before Google finally released their "Google Music" service, which has now been merged with their app store, the Google eBookstore, and movie rentals to be rebranded as "Google Play." (This post is about the music portion of Google Play, so I'm going to refer to it as Google Music for now to avoid being ambiguous.)

When Google Music was released I was pretty stoked. I had quickly bumped my head on the free space available in Amazon Cloud Player, and Google Music offers virtually unlimited space (you can upload 20,000 songs, which is way more than are in my library!) for free. Also, you can reportedly stream your music over the Internet to almost any device. This works pretty good on the Web, but I find the experience less than flawless on Android.

But before I tell you about my Android frustrations, I want to touch on a few problems with the Web player. I won't go into uploading music with the Music Manager; it's a little weird to not be able to upload them directly but instead have to point software at them and let it do it for you, but that's been covered already by others. I didn't find the upload experience particularly painful myself, and you only have to do it one time for the main body of your library, and then only occasionally (unless you buy your new music from Google, of course, and then it automatically shows up in your account without any uploading at all!) I find the player to be serviceable, but there are some things missing:

• There's no good way to eliminate duplicates. This was never a problem for me until I tried to upload a new CD worth of songs in FLAC format when I had already uploaded them in MP3 format. There's no way to tell which is the higher-quality copy, and there's no way to mark several files for deletion all at once. I'd like to re-rip all of my CDs to FLAC (which is lossless) at some point and eliminate the old MP3s I ripped years ago, some at embarrassingly low quality to save space on old hard drives, but when I do so it will be a real pain in the next to replace them on Google Play.
  
• Playlist functionality is pretty limited. I guess I'm spoiled by years of using Mediamonkey, but I would love to be able to have the player randomly select songs to play based on the star rating I give them, or some other classification, like "Christmas Music."
  
• Oh, wait. There IS no star rating system. It's thumbs up or thumbs down, and that's the best you can do on Google Music. And the rating isn't uploaded with the file; I know some of the MP3s I uploaded had ratings on them already. Actually, I know that ALL of them had star ratings already!
  
• Oh, wait again... there IS no way to assign a classification to the file, other than "Genre." In Mediamonkey I have a number of fields that I can use to classify files... I can automatically generate a playlist of songs for Christmas or Easter, or high-octane songs to keep me awake during my work day when there's no caffeine available. In the Google Play player, there's none of that.

But enough of that complaining; the Web player is serviceable, and it gives me instant access to my tracks from any Internet-connected computer. Could be cooler, but it gets the job done. My real gripe is with the Android app.

Come on, now. This is a Google service on a Google OS! Shouldn't it be AMAZING? Well yes, it should, but it's not... at least not on my lower-powered phone, a Samsung model that is called Vitality on Cricket (which is what I use) but which is called Admire on other carriers (I know MetroPCS has it by this name). The internal memory of this phone is a little cramped in this phone... only 125MB... and this is where many of the problems with the Google Music app seem to lie.

• The app seems to keep the catalog of music you're storing in the cloud, plus complete copies of any tracks you have recently played, stored in the phone's internal memory. This, friends, is madness. There is no reason to stick this huge file in my 125MB of phone memory when I've got a perfectly good 8GB MicroSD card riding in there (and the phone can support up to 32GB!) There are certain things that are required to exist in that internal memory, including some uncooperative apps which refuse to be moved to the MicroSD card. At least the Google Play Music app itself can be moved to the MicroSD card!
  
• Since the app fills up the internal memory with its own huge data file, after I use it for a while I wind up not being able to install new apps any more. Even if the app is going to wind up on the MicroSD card eventually, some free internal memory is required in order to install it in the first place. There are other high-profile apps that are offenders in this way as well... Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Google Reader, and some others are the usual suspects on my phone.
  
• So, in order to install new apps, I have to choose a few of these badly-behaved apps and do a "clear data" to free up some space. By the way, the fact that all of these apps are fighting for the same few MB of storage space also means that when I've got my huge Google Play Music file on my phone, I stop receiving new Gmail. Facebook, Twitter, Reader and the other members of this crew seem to somehow figure out how to keep operating... why not the other two apps from Google? On the Google OS? (Wait, did I mention before that this is Google software running on a Google OS?)
  
• When I "clear data" on Google Play Music, I have to wait for EVER for it to re-download its data file. I have no idea why this would be. I've currently got 9,312 songs in Google Music. There's no reason that at least a list of the albums couldn't be downloaded via a good WiFi connection in less than a minute. Track names and album art could populate over time, but at least with the list of album names I could start to select albums, and if I select album the app could quickly download the track list, and then I could start a song streaming. As it is now, I usually have to wait overnight for the songs to populate.
  
• Even then, even after waiting overnight, often the newest songs in my library aren't there. In fact, sometimes even days later, with WiFi available for a good 18-20 hours of the day in my home and workplace, those new songs don't show up. It's positively ridiculous.
  
• Sometimes after a "clear data" I can't get the song library to re-download at all.
  
• Fortunately, there is a "Refresh music from Google Music" link in the settings. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, it doesn't do squat.
  
• It is possible in the app to flag a track or album to be made available offline; when you do that, the audio data is downloaded to your phone (to that precious internal phone memory, apparently) so you can listen to it without streaming it. There is also a setting to allow that to happen automatically when you play a song, so that Lady Gaga track you listened to yesterday is automatically available offline today. Problem is, once you've downloaded that offline data, there doesn't seem to be a way to reclaim the space on your phone; if you flag it as not available offline, the size of that darn data file stays huge.
  
• Every time you open the Google Play Music app, it reports the name of the last song you listened to to Android, even if you don't start it playing. This is not a problem except that I scrobble my song plays to Last.fm (want to see what I listen to?), so every time I open Google Play Music it scrobbles the last song I played again. I've sometimes wound up having to delete three or four consecutive scrobbles of a single song from my list.
  
• Don't even get me started about automatic side-loading of tracks from my phone to my Google Music account. Dictate a shopping list into Evernote? It winds up in your Google Play Music. Record a radio talk show with TuneIn? It'll wind up in your Google Play Music. I don't know of any way to turn this off, or exclude files created by specific applications. I'd prefer to turn it off entirely... how often do I have an MP3 on my phone that I didn't already have on my computer? Here's a hint: NEVER.

I eventually gave up on the Google Play Music app. I haven't removed it from my phone, but it was so difficult to get it to work that I quit using it. Maybe if I had the snazziest Droid from Motorola and it had eighty zillion terabytes of internal memory I would be happy to let Google Play Music save a file in the phone's memory. But why should it take such a large file? This is supposed to be a streaming solution. It's supposed to mostly live on the Internet, not actually on the phone. I would prefer for the app to be mostly a front-end for a Web back-end, not a traditional music player that supports downloading the song automatically when you play it. I was so looking forward to using Google Play Music on my phone, which I got last December shortly after Google Music was released... now I'm pretty disappointed. I hope Google gets their act together and refines their app into something those of us with more modest Android phones are able to use.

Spotify vs. Rhapsody

I've been listening to Spotify a lot lately - particularly since they got the whole "social with Facebook" thing happening. It's pretty snazzy to have my tracks automatically coming up on Facebook, and of course being able to instantly play just about any song in creation on my computer whenever I want is pretty awesome. But here's the thing... my wife and I have been sharing a Rhapsody account for several years now. Rhapsody also allows me to play any song in the world on the cheap... plus, Rhapsody also allows me to transfer those songs to our non-Internet-connected portable music players. So I haven't seen a reason to switch to paying Spotify, although frankly Rhapsody has a pretty bad track record as far as their PC music playing software is concerned (frankly, it sucks, especially if you have a lower-powered computer to begin with).

So here's the thing. Today Spotify announced something that they apparently see as a "Great news, this is so cool!" moment, but which I see as an "Oh, I didn't realize that was how it works" moment. Here's the blog post:

http://www.spotify.com/us/blog/archives/2011/09/26/good-news-for-spotify-open-users/

Other Spotify users: did you know that the free all-you-can-eat buffet is only a six-month thing? I didn't realize that. After that time you can still listen to songs for free, but not as many as before. (Rhapsody used to have a similar listen-to-so-many-per-month-for-free policy, but recently I tried to listen to some tracks that way and I got 30-second previews, so that may not be the way it is any more.)

On top of all this, the new social features on Facebook will complicate our Rhapsody situation. Reportedly, soon Rhapsody will have some kind of integration with Facebook that resembles what Spotify has now. The problem is that since my wife and I share an account, if I link it with my Facebook, tracks will get scrobbled to Facebook if she listens to them even if I'm not around. I don't want that.

I also use Last.fm (say hi if you do too: http://www.last.fm/user/TulsaMJ), and Spotify also scrobbles there. Rhapsody does not scrobble to Last.fm natively like Spotify does, although I've found a way to make that happen (usually). My workaround works by scrobbling tracks from the Rhapsody RSS feed, so I have to be on a computer or at least have a computer running in order for it to work. And I still want to scrobble everything to Last.fm - my media player that I use with my own MP3s scrobbles there, and actually, since Spotify doesn't seem to scrobble tracks that aren't on Spotify to Facebook at all (although it does scrobble them to Last.fm) - quite possibly when Last.fm gets their Facebook Open Social application working, I'll turn off the scrobbling in Spotify and just use Last.fm for all of it. It sure would be nice if Rhapsody supported native Last.fm scrobbling like Spotify does!

So let me get to the point. For ten bucks a month, I could get my own separate Rhapsody account going. It won't scrobble natively to Last.fm, so if I play songs on a cell phone they won't scrobble, but it should scrobble to Facebook once they've got that running (should be pretty quick... they're one of the "media partners" Facebook keeps trumpeting about). That would allow me to listen to music on portable devices and on my computer, and it would also eliminate the problem of getting my wife's plays scrobbled to my Last.fm and my Facebook. This would also allow me to downgrade my wife's account, which now supports three portable devices, to the cheaper one-device version:

http://www.rhapsody.com/discover/pricing.html

OR, for ten bucks a month, I can subscribe to Spotify. I can listen on portable devices, scrobble to Facebook and natively to Last.fm, but I don't have the option of using tracks on my non-connected portable device. The added bonus is that the PC client for Spotify works better than the comparable Rhapsody application:

http://www.spotify.com/us/get-spotify/overview/

The services' music offerings are pretty comparable - I haven't run into music on one that I couldn't find on the other, although I know Rhapsody does have exclusive content (interviews and stuff) from time to time and I believe Spotify has their own exclusives of the same nature. I see them as a kind of Coke and Pepsi comparison: they're both dark colas that cost about the same and will quench your thirst, and it's a matter of which one you like better. For me, if Rhapsody had native Last.fm support, it would be the obvious choice; if Spotify had support of downloading music to non-connected devices, it would be the obvious choice. An added benefit of Rhapsody is that if you are on a computer that doesn't have their client software installed, you can still log in and play tracks using their Web interface - try THAT with Spotify!

What do you think? I'm interested in any opinions, differences you notice in the $9.99 plans of the two, advice or comments. If you'd like to visit me on Spotify, here's my public profile:

http://open.spotify.com/user/tulsamj

Facebook's Timeline, Online Privacy, and TMI

Yesterday around noon, my mind was officially being blown. I was watching the keynote presentation at Facebook's f8 Developer Conference, during which Mark Zuckerberg showed this to the world for the first time:



What you see in that video is a rather sentimental look at Facebook's new version of the Profile, which they are calling "Timeline." Timeline will organize all of your past Facebook activity chronologically, selecting the "most important" things via an algorithm (or via your own later editing) so that your profile is (more or less) a look at your entire online life. In fact, you can add things that aren't already present on Facebook, so your offline life (even pre-Internet) can be a part of your Timeline. I was amazed, and a little bit shocked! This is the first time I can remember an update to Facebook that strikes me as a win for the users, as opposed to a ham-handed attempt to bring in more ad revenue for Facebook. This is a way for users to present themselves online so that people who find them actually can know what's important to them. A way to get to know your friends better, or catch up with life events of old friends you'd lost contact with. A truly comprehensive online presence.

To make Timeline even more personal, Facebook also announced some enhancements to the "social graph" which will make sharing content even more comprehensive, personal, and immediate. Last night I was able to get Spotify to start "scrobbling" tracks to Facebook. "Scrobbling" is a concept that originated (if I understand it correctly) with social music site last.fm. What it means in concept is that every track you listen to is automatically recorded somewhere. In practice that doesn't actually happen (what if you hear it on the radio? A speaker at the grocery store? Using a portable player with no Internet connection? Using software that does not support scrobbling?) but with a little bit of work, long ago I managed to get most of the music I listen to during my work day to scrobble to last.fm. Getting Spotify to work with Facebook, by contrast, was actually very easy; I had already linked them back when I got my Spotify account, and it just started working... suddenly I got a comment on a track I was listening to right on Facebook, without me even actively mentioning it. According to Facebook, although I haven't had occasion to try this yet, you're supposed to actually be able to listen to the same song a friend is listening to, as they listen to it, synched up with their player. So they hear the same part of the song I hear. Now that's a social music experience!

The same thing is supposed to be coming to more music services, and also to video-on-demand services Netflix and hulu (among others). Over time, all of this information will be aggregated to your Timeline, so people will be able to find out, for example, which movies you watched on Netflix in September of 2011, or which album or artist you listened to the most in October. It will also function as a sort of social recommendation service, automatically endorsing the things you enjoy for all of your friends, who presumably have similar tastes to yours.

This all will have a few effects that people in general may not have thought of. For one thing, your Timeline/Social Graph will be an absolute bonanza for Facebook's advertisers. Is there a new Johnny Depp movie coming out? The people who've watched all of Depp's recent movies will be easily targetable by Facebook, because it will be chronicled in their Timelines. What about when an artist - let's go with someone a bit obscure, not a Lady Gaga or Eminiem - with a new CD coming out. The artist is relatively unknown, so the record label may not have the money to run a bunch of blanket advertising, but the people who have listened to that artist will be easily findable and targetable via Facebook, likely for much cheaper than it would be otherwise. And with the low barrier to listening to those tracks via Facebook + Spotify, those people who see the ads and then listen to the new tracks will automatically generate advertising for the music too, and for free! This is a marketer's dream coming true! Did you think Facebook was "free"? It's not. You're paying for it by giving it more and more information about yourself, every time you log in or do anything.

Another effect, when Timelines become available for everyone, is that everything you've ever done on Facebook will potentially be available to view, handily indexed in reverse-chronological order. This is going to be great if you've been judicious in what you've posted online, but if you have a habit of posting drunken beer-bash photos of yourself, you're going to want to get in there with the privacy and editing tools and make sure people see only what you want to see.

But what about privacy? you may ask. Well, I reply, what about it? What if things come up on your time line that you don't want people to see, or that you don't want to remember yourself? I'll quote a friend of mine on this topic: "What I didn't want to remember, I didn't post as a status update." If you don't want people to know it, was it really a good idea to put it on the Internet? Social networking has, for some people, created an atmosphere where oversharing is OK. "TMI" is what my friends and I call this: "Too Much Information." And this TMI factor gets worse when you figure in those "scrobbling" applications.


What if I listen to something on Spotify that I don't want to broadcast to my friends? What if I watch a movie that I don't want everyone to know about? And what if I forget to turn off the social sharing aspects of those applications before I do my watching or listening? Or, what if my daughter watches ten episodes of Hello Kitty on Netflix and I don't want that on my Facebook? Currently I don't see any tools for "un-scrobbling" my Spotify tracks - not that I intend to listen to or watch anything I wouldn't want to share, but occasionally I've been known to clear a track from my last.fm history if I didn't want it in my "library," and it would be nice to see those kinds of tools here. As it is currently, once you enable those social apps, the firehose is open... and once it's on the Internet, you can't really ever take it back. You can't un-shoot a gun or un-throw a rock, and even if you retrieve the bullet or the rock, if it hit someone on the way, you can't take that back.


That concern aside, I think people are going to dig this stuff. Personally, I already share all kinds of information online anyway: I scrobble my track plays on last.fm here, record what movies I watch here, record what books I read here and here, and keep a list of all those links here. You probably keep online records of some of the things you already do somewhere too; you may have online records of your cooking or your diet, your running or your vacationing, your family or your friends. All Facebook is really doing here is centralizing all of that information in one place. It's a masterstroke of genius, and I think it's going to be successful.


But again... what about privacy? What about the privacy of someone who doesn't want everyone in the world to know everything they do, so they never get on Facebook, or maybe never even use a computer? Well, I've got news for you: in 2011, "privacy" is just short of a myth anyway. If you use a checking account, debit card, or credit card, there are records somewhere of every time and place that you used them to pay for something. If you bought a house or a car, if you went to college or got a driver's license, there are records somewhere of all of it, handily indexed (if you live in the United States) by your Social Security Number. There are security cameras in most public places, and there are satellites with who-knows-what resolution of surveillance up in the sky, maybe looking at you and maybe looking at me. If you carry a cell phone, some computer somewhere knows exactly where you are, probably to within a few feet. The cell phone company potentially has a record of every phone call you make and every text message you send. Your email provider probably has logs of every email you send; on top of that, there are records of that email on the recipients' mail servers, and on every piece of equipment on the Internet that the message traveled through on the way from server to server. Your Web browser has, and probably your Internet provider also has, a record that you've visited my blog today and read this post. There are millions of datapoints of information about you out there right now, and you have control over very few of them. In actuality, though, just making your way through life, even in pre-computer days, you left a trail of information behind. Ask anyone who enjoys researching ancestry about the kinds of records that still exist for almost anyone... birth and death certificates, tombstones and land ownership records, journals and diaries and photographs and newspaper announcements. It's just that nowadays, that information is accessible and able to be cross-referenced in mind-boggling ways. If you'd like to see an imaginary but plausible account of how that data might be able to be used to aggressively control people, take a look at this fictional novel... or if you'd like a real-world example, pull down a copy of your own credit report and see how much it knows about you.

So privacy, as many people see it, is an imaginary thing. Somebody's always watching you; get used to it. But that doesn't mean you should do just any old thing online. Don't post things publicly that will allow someone who would like to hurt you, to easily find you (although your address is probably in the telephone book anyway). Don't broadcast information that will make it easy for someone to commit identity theft on you (although with information that most everybody has on their profiles, someone could probably call your place of business and convince a coworker that they are related to you). It's the same common sense you use when you're in an unfamiliar place: keep your eyes open, think about what's going on around you, pay attention if anything looks suspicious, and don't walk into trouble.


BUT: do enjoy yourself while you're there. Use social networking to enhance your life. But just be aware that sometimes when you're using a social network, that social network is also using you.

Netflix

So, I finally broke down and signed up for the free trial of Netflix. The main idea is to stream through our Wii; I signed up for the 1-DVD-at-a-time service too, but I'll likely cancel that and just go with the streaming. The streaming is much more economical... watch as many movies and TV shows as you have time for on Instant Streaming, vs. watch as many single DVDs as you can receive in the mail and send back, one at a time, for the same monthly price? No contest! There are, however, a couple of things about Netflix Streaming that annoy me a bit, and I wanted to blog about those things... maybe someone from Netflix will read this blog entry and take it to heart. (Fat chance, but a guy can dream, can't he?)

1. I'd like to see separate Instant queue profiles made available. Obviously, the shows in my queue (Bond movies, Star Trek, The X-Files, etc.) are going to be incompatible with the shows my 3-year-old daughter is going to want to watch (Care bears, Caillou, Strawberry Shortcake, Hello Kitty, Wonder Pets). Recommendations are going to be different, too. It would be nice to be able to select an Instant Queue to view, and maybe even select who's watching. It would be smart marketing, too.
2. I'd like better parental controls. Right now all you can do is limit the programs that can be viewed based on the MPAA rating... only allow shows rated PG or less, for example. This is a joke! For one thing, "NR" (Not Rated) movies fall in the area on the other side of "R" from "G", which means that the Mario Brothers Super Show cartoon from the 1990s, which my two kids like, is prohibited if I restrict my account to PG-13 or less. And if I turn on parental controls, I can't watch documentaries or more grown-up movies myself. "Control" indeed!
3. What's with the Android app only being available for like two-and-a-half phones? Make it available to all phones, but just "support" it on your shorter list. If people want to try it on their non-supported phone, why stop them? Worst case, they call support and you tell them their phone is not supported... and then you not which not-supported phones keep getting called in, and you add them to your support matrix as soon as you can!
4. What's with not being able to exit Netflix and go back to the Wii menus? Apparently you just have to turn the Wii off. User Interface FAIL.
5. Scrolling to a certain point within a program, or fast-forwarding/rewinding, is positively painful. You're telling me that after I select a new spot, you're going to re-download the entire show? Even YouTube does better than that! Software FAIL.

In general, we LOVE the Netflix service. I have a poky Internet connection (on purpose, to save money) so it's fairly easy to push it over the edge and cause the streaming to re-buffer, but that's not the fault of Netflix; I'm sure with a faster connection I'd get faster buffering. With a few tweaks, Netflix could be not only a killer service, but a killer application as well. Hoping that day comes soon!

Music in the Cloud

photo © 2010 photosteve101 | more info (via: Wylio)I've been looking for a feasible way to stream my music from the Internet since before the Internet was being called "the cloud."

My first stab at it was something like seven or eight years ago. I found a service that would let me upload some of my MP3s and play them back. It worked, but it was SUPER-clunky, and frankly it was unreliable as well. I used it a little bit, but eventually I just got tired of it and gave up. I don't even remember what the name of that company was; they've since been swallowed up by another company which is all about cloud-based storage and not particularly interested in music. Good thing I kept copies of my MP3s!

In the years since then, I've occasionally taken a look at music-locker services as they appeared, but nothing has really met the requirements of what I wanted. The last service I really remember looking at didn't actually allow you to upload music at all... it just scanned your local copies of your music library and then allowed you to play the (licensed) copies of those same MP3s from the cloud! Ingenious, but no good for some of my more obscure tracks... the ones I prize the most because I've had them a long time or because I worked hard to track them down in the first place. So I didn't waste my time with that service. Others felt so obscure and fly-by-night to me that I decided not to waste my time again until something came up that I felt I could trust to stay around for a while.


Meanwhile, I had discovered that for less than the price of a single CD per month, I could listen to almost any song I could think of by subscribing to Rhapsody. With the right subscription, I could even download the tracks to my portable music player and listen when I'm not at my computer! (Notice that this marginalizes the "scan your tracks and play back our copies" to complete irrelevance... with Rhapsody I can play any track, even if I don't have it in my library already.) Rhapsody doesn't take care of some of my most obscure tracks, but it adds a lot more tracks to the mix, some of which are more obscure than any in my collection. (Rhapsody isn't the only "subscription" music service by a long shot... the retooled Napster is another contender with a similar plan, and there are others if you look for them.) Color me VERY satisfied with Rhapsody, but it STILL doesn't let me play the rare songs from the dusty corners of my music collection from the cloud.

Earlier this year when I heard that Google was working on a new cloud-based music service I got really excited. I already use Google for my documents, my RSS feeds, my calendar, my telephone calls, and of course my email, so a streaming music service would fit in there nicely. (I don't use them for everything I keep in the cloud; I keep my bookmarks in Xmarks, my passwords in LastPass, my pictures in Flickr, etc., but I generally have good experiences with Google's services when I need them.)

After weeks of waiting impatiently for Google to release their service, suddenly this week there was a surprise: Amazon beat them to the punch! Amazon Cloud Drive was introduced a couple of days ago: 5GB of free space to store any files you like, but the part of that service that has garnered the most attention is that MP3 or AAC files stored on your Cloud Drive can be played back using Amazon Cloud Player. This was exactly what I had been looking for! 5GB is nowhere near enough space to store my whole music collection, but it's a start... and it's enough space to store the rare gems... anything I can play back through Rhapsody, I don't really have to store in a music locker, do I?

So I tried it out. It works as advertised: you upload your music, you see it, you play it back through your browser. You can also play it back using an Android phone if you have one, but I don't have one so no luck there, but I happily filled up most of my 5GB with songs that aren't on Rhapsody that I might want to listen to on the go. The player isn't particularly feature-laden, but it plays back the songs. It starts the playback quickly enough, and you can even "scrub" through to the part of the song you like, provided that part has streamed out to your browser. There's playlist support, play entire album, play all songs, that sort of thing. Not a bad start!

But what of Google? When I found out that Amazon had actually thumbed their nose at the music industry (who inexplicably believes that people who have purchased music should have to pay again to listen to that exact music online) and told them that they don't need any stinkin' license to do what they're doing... storing users' files and allowing the users access to those files. The music industry is seething, but they don't seem to have figured out a way to attack Amazon yet; I'm sure they will try to penalize Amazon somehow, because if they don't then other music locker services will also turn their noses up at licensing (it's pretty obvious that this is what's holding up Google, and probably Apple too; both of them have similar plans in the works). Kudos to Amazon for having the guts to push the issue. There is no technological reason why we don't have cloud-based music delivery of this kind; it's all music industry foot-dragging. This forces their hand; after the courts decide what's legal and what's not, I expect these other services to pop up almost immediately.

Will I continue to use Amazon's service after Google and Apple and whoever else get their services running? That remains to be seen. There is of course a lot of Google inertia in my case, and if their service is comparable to Amazon's and not inferior, I'll probably use Google's just because I'm using Google for so many other things. It's unlikely that I will use Apple unless they have a positively amazing service in store; iTunes is such awful software on Windows that it would take a totally mind-blowing service to get me to use that.

But let's look at another option. What if Rhapsody, or Napster or one of the other subscription music services, adds a music locker option to their offerings? Would I use that? Certainly I would! That would put all music that I had any interest in in the same place, behind the same login. I would likely even switch, for example, from Rhapsody to Napster if Napster offered a good music locker and Rhapsody did not.

The thing that makes me the happiest is that thanks to Amazon, the cat's out of the bag. They are too big to ignore, and the next move the music industry makes will determine how quickly or slowly more cloud music services appear, but they will definitely appear. People want them, and people will pay for them if they are good enough. People wanted to be able to obtain music online; the music industry didn't want it so people did it illegally anyway, and eventually, we got iTunes and Amazon MP3 and Rhapsody and hundreds of other legal outlets. If Amazon had to go a little bit rogue to get them to make this next advance, so be it. It will be fascinating to watch what happens in the coming weeks and months. It's going to be an exciting time for music lovers!