Out of the Box

When 5″ CDs first came on the market, they were considered small compared to their 12″ vinyl forebears. Now, to make slotMusic albums fit in nicely among their optical companions, SanDisk has put the microSD card inside the space required for a standard jewel box.

The result is, as you can see by the accompanying photo of the of the Robin Thicke slotMusic album Something Else, a wee bit of excess space — enough to fit the bundled USB reader, a little carrying case with postage-sized album art, and anti-theft devices all generously enveloped by a whole lot of plastic nothing.

And yet, I found myself in a usage scenario for the fledgling format just this week. On Tuesday, I attended a CD launch concert for my friend Tamara Hey’s new album Miserably Happy. It was a great show and I bought the CD there but, because I was preparing for a trip the next day, didn’t have time to get to a PC, rip it, and transfer it to an MP3 player. As a result, I didn’t get to listen to the album until today.

Alas, though, it looks like I would have been out of luck if I planned to listen to it on a PSP. I tried the slotMusic album with a small Memory Stick Duo adapter branded Kingston from a shop in Hong Kong but the PSP just seems to get stuck reading it. I plan to try it with a Sony Ericsson cell phone as well to see if it fares any better.

A recent Switched On discussed the latest offering from Lala.com, which is trying to pioneer the dirt-cheap Web song as an alternative to downloads. As part of its new offering, Lala provides hosted online access to your local music library, a feature that led to the demise of longtime digital music gadfly Michael Robertson’s MP3.com.

But today the BBC reports on Robertson’s new venture Datz, which offers a different take on subscription and music. Like Nokia’s Comes with Music program, the Datz device, a security key that attaches to your PC (Windows-only for now), enables all-you-can-eat access. Unlike the Nokia program, though, the songs are in MP3 format and can presumably be used with any device . The product/service combination costs £100 for a year of access, kind of the digital music version of magicJack, which has done well spreadking its message via infomercials.

Only two of the big four music labels have signed up for now, and of the program is limited to the UK, but it seems like a fresh and winning approach, certainly one that will offer a better value than existing subscription services if Sony BMG and Universal Music come on board and the subscription price after a year stays below $15. I only question why the hardware is needed. What difference does it make if someone is turning on the spigot from only one PC in the house?

Both Lala and Datz are showing that access and ownership are not mutually exclusive ideas, although Datz offers a level of assurance that consumers can continue to use their media should the venture fail.. And Datz not funny (sorry, Dave).

Much of the focus of slotMusic, SanDisk’s attempt to rekindle physical media sales by packaging high-quality MP3 albums along with other digital assets on a 1 GB microSD card, was on cell phones. After all, the number of microSD-enabled cell phones is probably already larger than the MP3 player market, and if it isn’t, it’s only a matter of time before it will be. In fact, when I first spoke with SanDisk about slotMusic, the company explained that it decided to go with rewriteable memory precisely because it wanted some digital storage available for the cell phone to use while a slotMusic album was inserted.

Among the top three portable music player companies, Sandisk is the only one to support removable media and so slotMusic could have been a good fit for lower-end players like the USB connector-equipped Sansa Express. But the company has pulled a little something out of its hat for the slotMusic launch — a new low-end Sansa slotMusic player designed for use specifically with slotMusic. It has no internal flash memory, no USB connector, and no display. In some ways, it’s a throwback to earlier devices such as some of  the RCA Lyra RD series players, which exclusively used Compact Flash cards for storage. Alone, it’s priced a hair above the cost of a new CD at just under $20. I’s also available in themed bundles featuring artists such as ABBA and Robin Thicke for $35.

Speaking of RCA, the brand enjoyed some success a few years back with its Rip n’ Go shelf systems that were able to load up a companion MP3 player by directly ripping CDs to it. Sandisk also promotes the slotMusic player as being a PC-free and Internet-free way to enjoy digital music, a growing advantage as MP3 players saturate the PC-proficient user base,  but also notes that the player will work with its own microSD cards, which stretch to 16 GB. And how would you load those up without a PC? Also, assuming slotMusic focuses on pop music (which it must to reach high volumes), isn’t that target market already PC-literate?

Regardless, it’s fine for Sandisk to support the slotMusic initiative with its own Sansa players, but the company is going to have to keep focused on the cell phone market if slotMusic is to have a chance of success in the market..

With its new and vastly improved portable player, Slacker’s trek may have entered “the next generation.” but its U.S. plans may be moving away from “the final frontier.” Slacker long had plans for a car dock that would enable it to receive programming via satellite, but VP of Marketing Jonathan Sasse told me last week that the company is now looking to leverage its satellite technology primarily in developing economies due to the strength of its caching technology and alternative high-speed delivery methods becoming more viable.

When I asked him if the merger of Sirius and XM, which looked far less likely to happen in Slacker’s early days, had anything do with the decision, he said it did not. The proposed price for Sirius XM’s music-only tier is competitive with Slacker’s premium radio option. Slacker maintains that it still has the upper hand, though, because of the ability to skip tracks, even as a limited (but in my opinion generous) option for non-paying listeners.

I agree with almost all the points that Rick Clancy makes as he places his bet that Blu-ray discs will be around for far greater than five years. That said, I actually think few in the industry would disagree with that. The question I’ve been asked more often is how long will Blu-ray grow, especially compared to the decade or so of growth that DVD saw, and how deep will its penetration reach, at least in the U.S..

Compared to the near monopoly that DVD had as a format for selling movies, Blu-ray will face more competition, including stronger legacy competition in the DVD. However, barring any breakthroughs such as DECE changing the nature of downloads, Blu-ray will continue to offer a superior convenience factor for movie buying.. (As for rentals, digital distribution may make inroads there more quickly.) Therefore, I think that Blu-ray will grow for more than the next five years, and see it starting to peter out in about seven or eight years.

If the recent announcement that the excellent Slacker service would soon be available on Blackberry devices got you thinking Slacker was abandoning its own hardware, it’s time to hit Pause. I’ve been trying out Slacker’s sequel to its original innovative but flawed portable device. The Slacker G2 is dramatically better in just about every respect — user interface, controls, build quality, materials and portability, to name a few. Slacker has also traded in the original player’s large canvas case for a slick silicone shell that includes an integrated belt clip.

Gone is the troublesome touch strip. The scroll wheel (which no longer feels mushy like the original player’s) brings up the menu system simply by scrolling to the bottom of the screen. Also, while I continued to encounter problems with the original player such as forgetting Wi-Fi passwords and intermittent stuttering at the beginning of a song, those problems have not appeared with the Slacker G2.

There are, of course, a few trade-offs. The title bar overlays a bit of the album art while the bottom of the screen with track information feels a bit cramped; such are some of the sacrifices of moving to a smaller screen. Also, the battery is no longer user-serviceable. Still, while I am looking forward to the Blackberry version of Slacker (Slackberry?) and still want an iPhone/iPod touch version, the Slacker G2 looks like it will take the prize for the most improved consumer electronics product of the year. Slacker’s claim that it has developed the best portable Internet radio experience on the market rings true.

It looks like most of what came out of CEDIA this year was thin TVs and powerful projectors, the latter of which rely on screens that make even the thinnest flat-panel look obese, but TiVo, which has been positioning like mad as a media company lately, remembered that they still need a way to get their service onto boxes in living rooms — and in ways that less dependent on an MSO’s fiat.

First from CEDIA is a the TiVo HD XL DVR that brings it back close to the price of the now-discontinued Series 3 at $599. It lacks the Series 3′s classy chassis, but beefs up recording capacity while reclaiming THX certification and the posh remote. At least for the custom install market, box looks don’t matter much anyway because professional installers often hide the electronics. But the HD XL will also be sold in made to the less-elite masses at retailers such as Magnolia and Amazon.

The more important development for TiVo in terms of scale would be news that DirecTV, which had forsaken TiVo after becoming cousins with NDS, will introduce a new set-top box that brings the DirecTV TiVo experience well into the 21st Century. However, details appear short at this point, and DirecTV may well position TiVo over the price of the NDS solution. That would reinforce TiVo as a luxury niche alternative, but it’s something that you can build on.

Just a few days after my Switched On.column on musical mashups in which  I talked about the possibilities of combining the Cerulean TX+RX with the EOS Wireless multi-room system, Gizmodo reports that Sony has introduced its own multi-room iPod dock, joining EOS Wireless and Klipsch. Unlike the EOS satellite speakers (which include a modest downward-firing subwoofer), the Sony satellite speakers offer remote control over iPod playback yet the system is priced competitively with the EOS Wireless speakers. A $400 kit will include the dock (which includes AV out but no speakers) and two external speakers, pegging the price of the main dock at about $240.

Also, like the EOS Wireless system, there does not appear to be a way to control the playback volume of satellite speakers from the main dock. Perhaps that would be possible, though, with an iPod touch application. While none of these products offer the flexibility or sophistication of Sonos, they are much simpler to set up than Wi-Fi-based systems and represent a great opportunity to make multi-room music more approachable.

The sudden momentum we’re seeing toward scrapping Wi-Fi for multi-room music has to have the folks at Logitech scratching their heads. The company entered the multi-room music market with products like the Wireless PC Music System and Wireless DJ that used a similar 2.4 GHz scheme. Both were part of its “Music Anywhere” system that Logitech promoted as “a better wireless solution with plug-and-play simplicity, digital audio clarity, and no home network required.” But that went out the window when the company acquired Slim Devices and its Wi-Fi-based Squeezebox.

On the heels of my Switched On column on how PC companies should focus more on the notebook as the new living room PC, the alert team at Stage Two Consulting set up a meeting at Boxee‘s SoHo’s office, which is, um, close to those of Pando’s (which makes me wonder whether Boxee would integrate a Pando client at some point because it could be handy and oh such juicy lawsuit bait).

In any case, Boxee, which began life under the pirate flag of the Xbox Media Center, has won praise for its user interface, which I agree is a fresh, fluid and engaging departure not only from Front Row and Windows Media Center but also previous attempts at creating clones of them (such as MythTV) from the open-source community. Company co-founder Avner Ronen compares what Boxee is doing for the open-source media center UI to what Firefox did for the open-source browser.

Rather than overwhelming you with infinite entertainment choices, by default it filters up the top recommendations and consumed items from those in your social network. Of course, it can also broadcast out your entertainment choices. Boxee, like the Dash Express, can also post what you’re doing to Twitter and other social networks. The software is still in alpha, and thus has some serious feature gaps. Search, for example, is in the queue, and the company notes that recording of cable content will get a lot easier with Tru2Way. Boxee runs on Macs and Linux with a Windows version slated soon, and we talked about a number of potential paths to the living room..

I’ll be sharing more thoughts on Boxee in the coming weeks.

Almost three years ago to the date, I wrote a Switched On column looking at the iHome iH5, which pioneered the iPod clock dock market. It spawned a great business for SDI Technologies, which owns the iHome brand as well as the rights to use the Timex brand for clock radios.

Now SDI is releasing the iH41)\, its first dock specifically created for the iPod touch. Like the handheld computer itself, it can be used in a vertical or horizontal orientation. The clock display rotates, and, while I’m not necessarily a fan of many devices that can be used in multiple orientations, I’ve always had an odd soft spot for rotating displays, like the front-panel electronic logo on the new Dell Studio Hybrid.

iPod speaker docks have been a successful endeavor for other companies, too, such as Bose and Logitech, but I frankly never liked the way many of them have the iPod protruding from the top like it’s on some kind of pedestal. And the form factors of other dockable iPods, such as the classic and nano, had their small screens enveloped by massive speakers flanking them. The scroll wheel — which works so well on the go — isn’t an ideal way to control a docked iPod.

The iPod touch and iPhone don’t solve these problems completely, but their more generic appearance help them look less out of place docked, and the touch UI is better for a home environment. In addition, of course, the ability for them to stream music over Wi-Fi via Pandora (and soon other services), bring new value to speaker docks.