GristyMcFisty used our news submit to tell us he read over at the Register that the flailing Roxio section of Napster has come up with a pretty good idea. It seems they have struck a deal with Dwango to sell ringtones over their network. Eventually, this arrangement could lead to other mobile downloads in the future, at least this article hints pretty strongly in that direction. They don't give any indication of cost and the best they can say of the availability of the new service is simply Next year. Sadly, it will only be in North America at first.
| The Dwango deal will see the formation next year of Napster Mobile, a service pitched at North American consumers, initially selling ringtones, but presumably with music downloads in mind when the bandwidth's there to make it practical.
The more ringtones punters buy through the Napster-branded service, the more points they earn which can be used to offset the cost of PC- or music player-based track downloads. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, so it's not yet clear to what extent the deal will earn Napster revenue directly or whether it's more about getting mobile phone owners to buy song downloads or subscriptions from the company. |
Everyone loves to download ringtones and now I guess that you can even buy a phone from Samsung with a hard drive inside, the SPH-V5400, includes 1.5GB of hard disk storage. See the above picture from Gizmodo for a look. I have long felt that someday we will only need a cellphone to access all our personal information. Be it on the Internet with Google or via a home network. Can you imagine someday, where you could just set your phone next to a PC anywhere and all of a sudden, there is your desktop! Looks like Roxio is on the right track with this move.
Don't forget to visit the Music Downloads, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) & Legal Issues Forum if you like to stay abreast of what is happening with P2P. Wonder how much that phone from Samsung will cost?
Source: The Register
