Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

If you want to stock up on some of the top albums of 2008, Amazon.com has a great deal on right now (for our US-based readers at least) where they're selling 50 albums for only $5 USD each. Quite a good deal!

"Blockbuster Inc. caught up to the competition last week by introducing a set-top box that brings rentals from the Internet to the television. Now, the Dallas-based company hopes to pass the pack by teaming with Microsoft Corp. on new mobile services that will let customers watch even more movies on more devices. "Eventually, we'll give customers instant access to any movie on any device with an Internet connection and a screen," said Keith Morrow, Blockbuster's chief information officer."

Blockbuster news continues to trickle out. Last week Blockbuster announced a new set-top box and over the weekend it was announced they would eventually support downloading to some Blu-Ray players. Today, the news broke that they are teaming with Microsoft to deliver a new set of mobile services, in part based on LiveMesh. Details are sketchy and this is more of a directional announcement than an product announcement. However, it sounds like Blockbuster is seriously considering how to better compete in this new media environment.

Now if they can just do something about the paltry size of their Blockbuster OnDemand library...

"For most of recorded music's life, delivery was tied to a physical medium of some sort. Physical formats included the vinyl record, cassette tape and the CD many of us still use today. With the advent of the digital age and digital music, the physical medium for music is a dying breed. The lack of interest in physical media for music has led to sharp declines in profits for music publishers. Most every music publisher sells digital tracks today, but the profit margins on digital music are much slimmer than what music companies see on CDs and other physical mediums."

This is one of the very rare posts that belong on all four Thoughts Media sites, but it's applicable to everyone because it involves music. Looking at the companies involved (Universal, Sony BMG, Warner, EMI) it's easy to see that this is a major initiative. The question is, will it succeed? I think it has a very slim chance of success if they execute the launch flawlessly, and hit a few major issues properly: first, price. If this format is any more expensive than CDs are at retail, it will fail. They also have to add value to the format - pictures and videos are a nice way to do that. If I could buy a slotMusic album of a favourite artist and get their last six music videos included, that would create value for me. And if they encode the MP3s at 320 kbps, higher than the major online music stores, that also creates some value - although only for the people that actually know what the term "bit rate" actually means. Read more...