talk overview
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Three facets
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- A vision
- A technology
- A product
vision
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How do we see the historical changes in the music industry? On which perception of current events did we put our money down?
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- Changes to the art form: a web-native medium
- Changes to the web: audio and video become the equal of text
- Changes to the business: as open (and closed) as the everything else on the web
technology
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What was our technological angle of attack? A portable device? A new kind of browser? A new internet standard?
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- Browser-centric view of user experience.
- Embrace internet standards.
- Extend the browser, don't replace it.
- Use any resource available in the browser, including Flash but also AJAX and other media plugins.
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How did we combine the vision and technology?
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- Link to media.
- Paste in a small bit of Javascript that we provide.
- Hit play.
features
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Powerful toolkit behind the simplicity
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- Link to media: microformat, multiple audio formats (not just MP3), multiple playlist formats.
- Paste in a small bit of Javascript that we provide: we do the hosting and supplement the Javascript with web services, and we do internationalization automagically.
- Hit play: knit all the tracks into a single playlist..
innovation
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Radical software under the hood
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- Playthispage: integrated screen scraper; everything is a playlist.
- Net capabilities of the browser: includes Flash, WMP, Quicktime, Javascript, HTML, CSS, server side, client side.
- Local link: what is the page context of this song? (demo)
- Single playlist of multiple incompatible proprietary media formats.
- Pin the player to the viewport, not the document.
medium
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How is music itself changing, and what does our software has to do with it? Our bet is that it is becoming part of a hybrid medium with both text and audio, all delivered by HTML over HTTP.
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- Keep the user in the page, don't send them off to an MP3 player.
- From metadata fields in ID3 to the mind boggling-ly rich set of tools the browser offers to supplement audio.
- The future of the album is the web page.
- Listening to an entire playlist in situ on a web page is like a webcast, but far beyond that. Long form audio merged with text/pictures/social features. A user experience with no name yet.
- Musicians producing at a bloggy rate -- fast, cheap, out of control.