It is so rare nowadays to see any cool web-based service to be first available in Europe rather than in the U.S. that Spotify is really worth mentioning even for just that (yes, we’d really, really like to get Hulu..). However, this music streaming service that has been dubbed as the “music piracy killer” and has received almost universal praise from its users, is finally planning to expand to the United States in Q3 or Q4 of this year.
Spotify is a music streaming service with quite massive selection of music, available in Ogg Vorbis format (using q5, appx. 160kbps encoding for its free service and 320kbps for its premium service), with simple-to-use GUI and ad-supported monetization model. Spotify’s ads run less frequently than what you’d expect with commercial radio and you can get rid of the ads completely by signing up to their premium service (that costs €9.99 per month or €0.99 for 24h period).
As the service provides very good quality, legal, audio streaming with rather massive music selection, it has already become extremely popular in the countries where it is available (Spotify is currently available in the UK, Finland, Sweden, Norway, France, Italy and Spain) — partially cutting down the interest towards illegal music downloads. Our Finnish users have been praising the service for couple of months now and most of them seem to be extremely happy with the audio quality as well as with the usability of the product. Spotify has also announced that they’re developing client apps for various mobile platforms, expanding the service beyond PC desktop.
Result for: hulu
In early May, Disney announced that it had obtained an equal equity stake in the popular online video site Hulu, giving it equal influence with founders NBCU and Fox.
Today, the first Disney/ABC content has become available on Hulu, with Grey’s Anatomy becoming the first series available. As it does with some other shows, only the 5 most recently aired episodes will be available at any given time.
There will be additional ABC content coming this week, says Disney but the content will not not be revealed except through the site’s Hulu Days of Summer .
Result for: hulu
Three major motion picture studios, Lionsgate, Paramount, and MGM have jointly announced the launch of Epix, an HD online streaming service and HD TV station that will allow users to watch the studio’s films, for free, in HD.
This may sound similar to Hulu except there is no advertising, and you won’t see any charges. The service is bundled directly into cable subscriptions, and the movies will air before they even hit DVD, like a standard televsion PPV.
Emil Rensing, chief digital office at Epix, says the movies will also be available online in full 720p streaming, at EpixHD.com.
Arstechnica elaborates and says “the video is offered through Flash and is multi-bitrate enabled; the player checks the available bandwidth every ten seconds to see if a larger or smaller stream is required. Epix currently creates six different encodings of each film which range from full HD support all the way down to 500Kbps (cell phone quality). In our own test preview of Iron Man, video was the best we have ever seen in a mainstream streaming service.”
The only catch is that EpixHD.com will only be available to users who are subscribers to cable company’s internet and TV services. Chances are you already are though.
