RealTechNews.com - Independent Tech

Sunday, January 23, 2005

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are here to stay, and are on the verge of being exploited by commercial media firms, says a panel of industry experts. Once several high-profile legal cases against file-sharers are resolved this year, firms will be very keen to try and make money from P2P technology.

Hypocrites....

# Permalink Posted at 6:35 AM 2 comments Email this Link

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So basically they're going to just move their pay-per-download model over to p2p and save on bandwidth and server costs (most likely).

In other slightly unrelated news, I received a gift card for Virgin Digital for Christmas this year. It allowed me to download a certain number of songs at $0.99 a piece. I was sorely dissappointed to find that they're only encoded at...128Kbps!!! On top of that, I was unfortunate enough to have my computer crash after I had downloaded them. I was able to back up the files themselves and what I hoped were the licenses, but then I had to reformat and reinstall Windows. After I got Windows installed again, I tried to restore the files, which worked fine. I then tried to restore the license--not happening. So now, I had all but 1 song already downloaded and I couldn't access the 20-some others that I had before. I sent tech support an email and their final solution was to give me a 14-day free trial to their "Digital Music Club". Okay, that's all fine and dandy. So I went to go and re-license the songs using the trial. Now, I find that when my trial period ends, so do my licenses for the songs (and I can't burn them to a CD anymore like I could with the others...but didn't because I was waiting to use the whole card). So basically, I don't have anything but one song (encoded at a very low bitrate) that I can keep out of about 30 that I was supposed to have. How's that for customer service?

# posted by David 7:00 AM

Sounds more like customer screwvice to me...

# posted by Bill 9:07 AM

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