white elephant
When Mr Fry hosted QI they had a running theme of the elephant in the room, title denotes the elephant this product is.
Over a year after it was first announced, the UK music startup described as "the most ridiculous digital music launch in history" will finally be available to punters tomorrow. Electric Jukebox bundles music with a £169 remote control and a dongle, so you can play tunes on your TV. After that, it's £52 a year, and the company …
Huh!!
Amazon Fire TV stick = £32.99
Amazon Prime account = £79 (inc free next day delivery, Prime video content, Prime music content)
Electric Jukebox = £169 inc first year of account
Electric Jukebox = £52 there after a year (music only (assuming its still available in 12 months))
Anyone see a flaw in the business model or is it just me??
I'd hope it has a better selection of music than Amazon Prime (lots of Best ofs). Amazon have launched an additional service that gives you more music though.
That said, why you wouldn't just buy a phone and a bluetooth speaker is beyond me. Much better than a proprietary service that won't be around in a couple of years.
However, I'm not going to pay £52 a year for a streaming service when I have all the music I want on CDs and on the LAN. Simply none of these services contain much of the music I listen to, and I have a vast collection of stuff from years of buying CDs and Albums. Will it contain any ECM albums? If Eicher still holds out 6+ years already then no it won't.
Year 2? Bwahahah.
I hope this can be rooted / reflashed into something useful when the service dies.
Landfill Android and a pair of PC speakers does nicely in the kitchen for me. iplayer, spotify and KEXP - and no Stephen Bloody Fry.
How long before they produce a phone app & PC client to access the service to try to gain some users who don't want to spend this much on single-use hardware and be tethered to a TV, and how much longer before they shutter it? £7M isn't much in this game of last-man-standing.
Then again, I'm pretty poor at guessing what people will buy. But surely this ain't it...
Indeed.
A one-off fee of GBP 9.99 gets you a device which allows you to access multiple streaming services forever.
Or you could visit the charity shops, pick up CD's for next to nothing and give the remainder to charity. Doubleplusgood.
All this, "I must have what I want right now - I'll pay stupid money for it" is not character building. "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" needs to be shown more often.
Do they still play adverts on heavy rotation? Last time I heard Absolute the same adverts were being played every 15 minutes or so. After an hour I turned the radio off and wondered how long I'd get for burning down the heavily plugged solicitors office.
I've not listened to them again. Or burned down any other solicitors offices.
Of course it costs a lot of money compared to it's competition but things like An Advisory Board of (mostly retired) bigwigs from finance and the music industry will cost a huge amount.
I'm not sure what value it will add however.
For me, my Serviio server cost me (something like) 30 of my local dollars and Petr Nejedly never bugs me for any more money.
When he does however, I will gladly pay up because it is such good value.
Something the Advisory Board might like to discuss at their next meeting.
Why would you need an iPad with the Apple tv comparison? Just Apple tv and the subscription would be enough.
Once thing all of those options ignores..... You Tube.
A Firestick or just any smart TV and unlimited free music streamed via You Tube. Every song also comes with the accompanying video.
Surely the investors can see this is far too late to market
I also got increasingly annoyed at how much air time on 6 'Music' was taken up by people plugging their new; book, film, tv show, or just about anything else that wasn't music.
Switched to Planet Rock, some adverts, but less talking, certainly less 'plugging', and mostly pretty decent music (if you like that sort of thing, which (i'm gonna make a pretty broad assumption) i'd guess most people here would)