Brian's Brain

I still vividly remember the first time I fired up the NCSA Mosaic browser in late 1993. Viewing the rich text and graphics within the crude first-generation HTML pages, and navigating from page to page and server to server via hyperlinks and mouse clicks, I had a keen sense that I was experiencing something that was about to get real big, real fast. How big and how fast, I must confess, I greatly underestimated.

I've been having that same sense of 'something big' the past two weeks (a feeling I haven't had this strongly, I might add, in over a decade's worth of subsequent reviews of new technologies and products based on those technologies), as I've put the beta version of YMU (Yahoo's Music Unlimited subscription service) through its paces. As you'll see when my digital audio cover story is published on June 9^th, Apple's current dominance of the portable audio player and download-and-own digital audio distribution markets is significant and, some might say, insurmountable.

What's particularly intriguing to me about YMU, the latest implementation of Microsoft's Janus DRM (digital rights management scheme, aka Windows Media DRM 10, also employed by Napster To Go and RealNetwork's Rhapsody To Go), therefore, is that it doesn't try to beat the iTunes Music Store at its own game. Instead it changes the rules. Keep your iPod, and all the FairPlay DRM-soaked music you've bought for it. But for a relatively low additional hardware entry point (the 4 GByte Creative Zen Micro, for example, is $179.99 from the Creative Store, and the 5GByte version is the same price elsewhere), you've got access to a library of what Yahoo claims is over one million tracks' worth of music, plus over a hundred Internet radio stations...as long as you keep your subscription active. It's a no-risk approach; you can download as many tunes off Yahoo's servers as your computer hard drive will hold (and stream all you want beyond that point), and if you listen to some music and decide it's junk, you're not out the $15 you'd spend on a CD.....just delete it with a click of the mouse and grab something else.

When I first heard about Janus and the subscription services it enabled, I was skeptical. I'm 39 years old, and I come from a generation that's been raised on the idea of going to record stores and buying various-sized pieces of plastic containing audio information, which I subsequently owned and could do with as I pleased. But then I started thinking about the various ways in which my wife and I consume multimedia content. We go to the movies; we don't own that material. We watch television; we don't own that material, either. Remember that the Betamax Case only allows us to time- and location-shift our one-time viewing of broadcast content. After my wife watches a show (I barely watch any TV), she deletes it from the ReplayTV. Not because the law says she has to, but because there's only so much space on the ReplayTV's hard drive, and there's more she wants to see. It's been years since we recorded a show to VHS tape.

I buy the vast majority of my music nowadays in download-from-server-and-burn-to-CD form. After I rip the content to our media server, the CDs collect dust in a closet. Most of the tunes I listen to in my office stream over DSL and out my computer speakers courtesy of my subscription to Sirius Radio. We only own a handful of DVDs; most of the movies we watch at home are rentals from Blockbuster Online. And when I'm traveling, it's increasingly likely that I'm watching a rental from Movielink on my laptop. So I guess I'm further down the subscription road than I initially thought.

I've been test-driving YMU in conjunction with three players; an Audiovox/UTStarcom SMT5600 Smartphone with a 256 MByte Sandisk miniSD card and PocketPCTechs' 2.5-to-3.5mm jack adapter, a 5 GByte Creative Zen Micro (running beta firmware v2.11.02), and a 5 GByte iRiver H10 (running firmware v2.03). To assess audio quality, I employed two sets of headphones; Etymotic Research's ER-4 and Koss's The Plug. On the PC, I ran Windows XP SP2 and Windows Media Player 10.

In the paragraphs that follow you'll find my to-date pros-and-cons observations of each portable player, along with bigger-picture comments of YMU and the Janus DRM that powers it. The one aspect of YMU I haven't yet been able to try out is streaming of subscription content throughout the house; my Voyetra Turtle Beach Audiotrons don't support DRM'd content, and I haven't freed up enough time yet (most of my portable player testing has occurred during daily walks of our five dogs) to fire up the Roku PhotoBridge HD and SoundBridge Network Music Players I've got on hand. Keep an eye out for future coverage of this topic on Brian's Brain.

Continued with Janus Dissected....