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Time Warner Builds iTunes Competitor

Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 3:05 PM - by

Time Warner Cable is launching a music service intended to compete with iTunes. The music subscription service will offer more than 3 million songs from EMI Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group as well as independent labels, according to Time Warner on Thursday.

The Road Runner Music Service is a subscription service and music store. The Time Warner Road Runner Music Portable is a service that allows customers to play the content on portable music players.

"These enhanced music products offer superb functionality and a solid value for our customers," said Steve Cook, group vice president of High Speed Online and Road Runner for Time Warner Cable. "We are pleased to offer our customers music products that are convenient and easy to use both in the home and on the go."

Here are the features of the service:

  1. RRMS is a subscription service only.
  2. Files are in Windows Media format, protected.
  3. RRMS supports PCs only
  4. MusicNet is writing the media player for Time Warner
  5. Synacor will handle billing and authentication

For US$9.95/month customers will have access to subscription songs, ad-free radio, and music videos. For an additional US$5/month the Road Runner Music Portable service will allow customers to play ther content on up to three portable media players.

Specific media players were not mentioned in the release.

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gslusher said:

member since 13 Nov 2002 with 2088 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Oct 04, 2007 3:38 pm

One question: what happens when Time-Warner decides to kill this business? Will the subscribers' music go poof?

Do note that they charge $5/month extra to use the music on a portable player. Thus, for most people, the subscription will cost $14.95/month.

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mahuti said:

member since 09 Jan 2003 with 377 posts, TMO Staff, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Oct 04, 2007 3:46 pm

I'm so sick of the bazillions of crappy companies trying to get into the Music Subscription + Protected Windows Songs racket... I've come up with a crappy acronym; Mu-SPeWs.

No more Muspews!

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Sir Harry Flashman said:

member since 08 Feb 2007 with 792 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Oct 04, 2007 3:52 pm

gslusher wrote:
One question: what happens when Time-Warner decides to kill this business? Will the subscribers' music go poof?

Do note that they charge $5/month extra to use the music on a portable player. Thus, for most people, the subscription will cost $14.95/month.

This could be it, the music service that kills the Nokia music store. /snark

I don't know, there are a lot of people out there with RoadRunner broadband service and maybe that will have an effect.

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artpease said:

member since 29 Mar 2006 with 7 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Oct 04, 2007 4:06 pm

How many million times does it have to be said that "People don't want to rent their music, they want to own it"?

It must be well over 3 billion times, the number of songs sold on iTunes...Geez

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Engine Joe said:

member since 29 Jun 2004 with 413 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Oct 04, 2007 4:38 pm

Sir Harry Flashman wrote:

I don't know, there are a lot of people out there with RoadRunner broadband service and maybe that will have an effect.

I have Road Runner and completely ignore everything they offer. I just use the internet connection. No "Road Runner" optimized browser or mail client. Moreover, I don't know anyone who *does* use those features or the RR portal. I can't see the # of RR subscribers having any correlation to this store's success.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Oct 04, 2007 4:57 pm

I have Time Warner RR as well, but I have to ask... Since this is Windows only and I am on a Mac is my monthly Time Warner RR bill subsidizing this and are they using up the bandwidth I pay for for this? Are they going to start packed sifting on their network to favor the traffic from their music store? If yes I want refund of part of my bill.

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macpro3000 said:

member since 01 Aug 2002 with 22 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Oct 04, 2007 6:26 pm

Huh... another subscription service that 1. does not support Macs 2. have DRM built into the WMA tracks and 3. and you rent the songs.... sorry... never for me ever.

I like the new Amazon.com MP3 store... I can buy and own the DRM-free MP3 files and put it on any computer, CD, iPod or music player I own. That is nice.

This WB thing despite the saturation of Road Runner subscribers will be a bust.

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Dirt Road said:

member since 24 Oct 2002 with 1239 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Thu Oct 04, 2007 8:41 pm

Should TMO perhaps start an iTunes Competitor Body Count, alongside the Apple Death Knell Counter?

Seriously, I can't imagine RR Music "Service" (you know, like "servicing" a cow what with all the DRM) is going to get very far. If it's limited to RR subscribers, they're sharply limiting their potential base… a thin slice to start with, minus iTunes/iPod users, minus people who just don't give a rip (heh) about digital music.

The only potential upside I could see is that if each TimeWarner headend caches the music library, they could pretty much eliminate bottlenecks outside the cable network (in laymen's terms: faster downloading). When DOCSIS 3.0 technology rolls out next year, they could conceivably provide download speeds of 100Mbps or better.

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A guest said: (hide)

Thu Oct 04, 2007 10:43 pm

It's not an "Itunes competitor."

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burrito said:

member since 07 Aug 2005 with 177 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Fri Oct 05, 2007 12:02 am

any online music store that truly wishes to pose a threat to itunes has to be compatible with ipod, which pretty much means drm-free. too many people have ipods and are deeply entrenched in itunes to the point that an alternate service would have to be fully compatible and supplemental to both. the only way to dethrone itunes is to either dethrone ipod or embrace ipod, simply ignoring it does not work.

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JulesLt said:

member since 06 Jul 2005 with 136 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Fri Oct 05, 2007 7:42 am

I like the fact they can't even name ONE device it will work with. Presumably not the Zune either.

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Tiger said:

member since 17 Jun 2003 with 1018 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Fri Oct 05, 2007 10:16 am

The list of five things is actually a list of five reasons why I'll never use it.

3 million songs. Impressive. In effect, they have to sell each and every one at least ONCE to stand a remote chance of catching iTMS. Considering 95% of those are probably total crap, I wish them good luck with that!

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