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Dan Graziano |May 9th, 2012 at 10:05PM
According to CEO Joe Kennedy, Pandora has surpassed 150 million users in the United States and is the second most downloaded app in the history of Apple’s App Store, CNET reported on Wednesday. The Internet radio service has big plans for the future and is working with automakers to integrate the service into virtually all future vehicles. “We truly believe this is just the beginning,” Kennedy said at the CTIA Wireless trade show in New Orleans. Over the past year, the company has faced incr...
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Zach Epstein |May 3rd, 2012 at 10:30AM
Samsung is hosting a press conference on Thursday during which it will unveil the next installment in one of the most successful smartphone franchises of all time. The Galaxy S III is expected to be a technological marvel, packing a gigantic high-definition Super AMOLED display, a quad-core Exynos processor, 4G LTE, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and more into an ultra-thin ceramic case. Samsung has gone to great lengths to keep its new flagship phone under wraps, but an inevitable series of leaks paints what...
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Zach Epstein |May 2nd, 2012 at 07:30AM
Spotify on Tuesday announced that its highly anticipated iPad application is now available for download in Apple’s App Store. The free app allows premium Spotify subscribers to access the company’s huge portfolio of music, stream tracks and playlists, and share songs. The new Spotify iPad app also features gapless playback, a crossfade function and AirPlay integration, allowing users to stream music wirelessly from the iPad to AirPlay-compatible devices. Spotify’s full press release follows ...
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Dan Graziano |Apr 28th, 2012 at 09:12AM
Apple is reportedly in talks to stream films owned by EPIX — a joint venture among Paramount Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Lionsgate — across a variety of devices, including the long-anticipated iTV, according to a report from Reuters. Two people with knowledge of the negotiations told the publication that the talks are in the preliminary stages and no agreement is considered near. The Cupertino-based company is reportedly looking to beef up the content offered through its Apple TV set-top box and upc...
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Zach Epstein |Apr 25th, 2012 at 11:00AM
Microsoft is reportedly preparing to unveil a new streaming music service at the annual E3 conference later this year. Citing unnamed sources, The Verge reports that the new streaming service will work across several platforms including Xbox, Windows 8, Windows Phone, iOS and Android, accessible through a native app or a web browser. Code-named “Woodstock,” the service is reportedly comparable to Spotify, potentially allowing users to stream unlimited music. The service will also seemingly feature...
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Zach Epstein |Apr 23rd, 2012 at 04:05PM
Netflix posted its financial results for the first quarter of 2012 after the bell on Monday. The company reported a loss of $0.08 per share, or$5 million, on $870 million in revenue, beating analysts’ consensus. Netflix posted a profit of $1.11 per share on $719 million in revenue in the first quarter last year, and Wall Street was expecting a loss of $0.27 per share on $866 million in sales this past quarter. All eyes were on Netflix’s subscriber additions this quarter, and the company said it...
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Dan Graziano |Apr 19th, 2012 at 05:00PM
A small group of coders claiming to be part of the hacker group “Anonymous” are creating a new social music platform, WIRED reported on Thursday. The goal of the project is to create a service that seamlessly pulls together songs that are streamed across the Internet. The project, called Anontune, will be able to aggregate songs from third-party sources such as YouTube and SoundCloud, and it will allow users to arrange them into playlists and share with others — anonymously. The Anontune system ...
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Zach Epstein |Apr 16th, 2012 at 07:50AM
CTIA Wireless is shaping up to be a bit slow this year and despite the overlap in timing, it appears Samsung will look elsewhere to unveil its next-generation flagship smartphone. The South Korea-based consumer electronics giant circulated invitations on Monday to a press conference that will take place in London on May 3rd. While Samsung does not specifically name the highly anticipated Galaxy S III smartphone on the invitation — the only relevant text is “come and meet the next Galaxy” — it ...
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Zach Epstein |Apr 13th, 2012 at 05:30PM
Online retail giant Amazon is said to be stretching the truth regarding the size of its streaming content library when reporting numbers to the public. According to a report from Fast Company, the “17,000 movies and television shows” Amazon claims to offer Amazon Prime customers is inflated by roughly 10 times. Amazon Prime members have free, unlimited access to Amazon’s streaming content catalog, which can be viewed using a number of devices including a Roku set-top box and Amazon’s K...
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Dan Graziano |Apr 13th, 2012 at 03:20PM
Netflix in 2006 held an open competition to find the collaborative filtering algorithm that would best predict whether or not a user would like a particular film or TV show based on previous ratings. The grand prize of $1 million was awarded to a team called “BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos” in 2009. The team’s algorithm was found to be 10% more effect than Netflix’s own recommendation service, however the company never implemented the team’s solution into its own service. “...
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Zach Epstein |Apr 4th, 2012 at 03:50PM
Spotify is the darling of tech blogs, but the overwhelming media hype leading up to the service’s U.S. launch has seemingly not carried over to end users. According to a recent report from the New York Post, paid subscriber growth in the U.S. has failed to meet expectations thus far. Spotify launched stateside roughly nine months ago and the service amassed 250,000 paid subscribers in its first three months. According to the Post, Spotify is now home to 3 million users in the U.S., but only 600,000 are ...
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Zach Epstein |Mar 29th, 2012 at 01:20PM
Cable network operator and Internet service provider Comcast reportedly confirmed earlier this week that it would give its own video streaming service a huge advantage over rival services like Netflix. Showing blatant disregard for net neutrality principles, Comcast said this week that its video streaming service Xfinity will be exempt from the 250GB bandwidth cap it foists on subscribers, Raw Story reports. Movies and TV shows streamed using rival services such as Netflix and Hulu will still apply toward use...
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Dan Graziano |Mar 26th, 2012 at 07:05PM
Online movie streaming in the United States is expected to top both DVD and Blu-ray use for the first time ever in 2012, according to a study from IHS Screen Digest. The study suggests that in 2012, Americans will legally stream 3.4 billion movies online — twice the 1.4 billion streamed in 2011 — while DVD and Blu-ray movies watching this year will to 2.4 billion from 2.6 billion in 2011. Last year, the unlimited-streaming services offered by Netflix and Amazon Prime accounted for 94% of all paid online...
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Zach Epstein |Mar 13th, 2012 at 09:30AM
Apple’s rumored iOS-powered high-definition television will enter production in May or June ahead of a launch slated for the fourth quarter this year, one analyst claims. Jefferies & Company analyst Peter Misek met with unnamed sources during a recent trip to the East, and he now believes Apple’s “iTV” is a sure thing. “Specialty components have begun to ship to Apple’s Asia panel suppliers with polarized films, filters, and IGZO components starting to move in small qua...