You make a really good point Greg about Rio and their mp3 players, but it's sort of a flawed point. Yes Mp3s were great back in the day. I gladly waited 30 minutes to download a 3 minute song (dial-up was a bitch back then) you also didn't find the music industry bitching about piracy back then as much as they did only a couple years later. With the arrival of broadband my 30 minute wait turned into 30 seconds for that 3 minute song. Then p2p services made it easy to share your collection with hundreds of other people's collections. But the real piracy stink was caused easy software for turning those mp3s into custom audio CDs.
As far as mp3 players not taking off right away was more of a hardware limitation than anything else. Early mp3 players could only hold 16-32 megs of mp3s. They also took a good bit of time with USB 1.0 to transfer and it was almost not worth it as it fit less songs than the average audio cd. Then came the ipod with mass storage capacity (thanks to the hard drive), USB 2 or firewire speeds, and easier to use software bundled with a music store. It was quite a simple equation to equal a winning product that I had dream of years before I even got my first Rio mp3 player.
When the ability to readily and easily fill the consumer needs for movie content in a non physical way with the appropriate terms of usage, delivery and what not arrive the service will take off faster than you think! Whoever fulfills this task stands to make a TON of money. Currently it looks like Apple, and Microsoft are in the best situation to take advantage of digital downloads. I wouldn't doubt the whole "conspiracy theory" the by Microsoft supporting HD-DVD was really only an attempt to stall both Blu-ray and HD-DVD from becoming very successful in the market so that they can present a digital download system capable of meeting the markets needs.
“While it's not exactly punching it out with the heavyweights in multi-room audio, the Mint Studio does certainly hold its own with many similarly-priced iPod docks out there.”
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You make a really good point Greg about Rio and their mp3 players, but it's sort of a flawed point. Yes Mp3s were great back in the day. I gladly waited 30 minutes to download a 3 minute song (dial-up was a bitch back then) you also didn't find the music industry bitching about piracy back then as much as they did only a couple years later. With the arrival of broadband my 30 minute wait turned into 30 seconds for that 3 minute song. Then p2p services made it easy to share your collection with hundreds of other people's collections. But the real piracy stink was caused easy software for turning those mp3s into custom audio CDs.
As far as mp3 players not taking off right away was more of a hardware limitation than anything else. Early mp3 players could only hold 16-32 megs of mp3s. They also took a good bit of time with USB 1.0 to transfer and it was almost not worth it as it fit less songs than the average audio cd. Then came the ipod with mass storage capacity (thanks to the hard drive), USB 2 or firewire speeds, and easier to use software bundled with a music store. It was quite a simple equation to equal a winning product that I had dream of years before I even got my first Rio mp3 player.
When the ability to readily and easily fill the consumer needs for movie content in a non physical way with the appropriate terms of usage, delivery and what not arrive the service will take off faster than you think! Whoever fulfills this task stands to make a TON of money. Currently it looks like Apple, and Microsoft are in the best situation to take advantage of digital downloads. I wouldn't doubt the whole "conspiracy theory" the by Microsoft supporting HD-DVD was really only an attempt to stall both Blu-ray and HD-DVD from becoming very successful in the market so that they can present a digital download system capable of meeting the markets needs.