The heat index in most of the Northeast has been a few degrees into the triple digits for three days. But as your friends here at Appscout will gladly tell you, the Internet never sleep--for that matter, neither do award ceremonies. With that in mind, armies of Web stars in various interpretations of formal attire descended upon NYU's Skirball Center for Performing Arts for the 2008 Webby Film and Video Awards.
Chloe Albanesius is working on a post that will feature a complete rundown of the event, including all the now-infamous five-word acceptance speeches. For me, the high point of the evening was partaking in the red-carpet press gauntlet and getting a chance to chat up some comedy legends such as David Wain (pictured above, a self-proclaimed AppScout fan--I'll refrain from going all fanboy and declaring Wet Hot American Summer the funniest movie of all time), Lorne Michaels, Seth Myers, Tim and Eric, and the night's host, Judah Friedlander. We also spoke with Michel Gondry and Rosie Perez, as well as Web stars like Tay Zonday and the Obama Girl, Amber Lee Etting.
After the jump, videos of Tay Zonday singing Weezer, Amber Lee Etting waxing analytic about VP nominees, Tim and Eric talking about sketch-comedy PC optimization, an utterly confused David Wain, and more.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Best TV On the Web: Wainy Days
Don't know David Wain? Learn his name. He's making some of the funnier--and oh-so-definitely not-safe-for-work--online videos on his weekly show, Wainy Days. It's a "channel" on the Web site My Damn Channel.
I'd never heard of Wain until stumbling upon Wainy Days by accident, after following links for the Internet phenomenon called You Suck at Photoshop. In Wainy Days, Wain plays a fictionalized version of himself, constantly on the hunt for love. Or, just as often, sex. Non sequiturs and breaks with reality and the fourth wall are de rigueur. So is the recurring gag of pushing people down as they pass on the street.
A typical episode usually features Wain meeting a girl, getting the girl, and losing the girl in the most ridiculous way possible. For example, in "Dorvid Days," he runs off to LA to be with his online girlfriend Nora. She introduces him to her brother with "Stephen Hawking Disease." The brother gets lost and is mistaken for an ice cream cart by the ice cream guy. (Yeah, you read that right). Wain saves the brother. But the girl breaks up with Wain for the ice cream guy anyway.
And that's a polite example, one of the few that doesn't feature some over-the-top comedic violence, ridiculous sexual situations, and/or copious amounts of bodily fluids. (Did I mention it's NSFW? Seriously. Even with no nudity.)
Wain's street cred: He is the co-creator of comedy groups The State and Stella and directed the films Wet Hot American Summer and The Ten. The latter, recently released on DVD and iTunes, is heavily (but not annoyingly) pimped on all the most recent Wainy Days episodes. (And it's on my Netflix queue, believe me.)
Since Wain actually knows a ton of Hollywood talent from his films, he features actors you've actually heard of as guests on Wainy Days, including Rob Corddry (The Daily Show), Jonah Hill (SuperBad), Paul Rudd (The Ten, 40-Year-Old Virgin) and David Krumholtz (Numb3rs). And Wain is frequently helped out behind the scenes by former Stella and The State comrades such as Michael Ian Black--the man who used to be the voice of the beloved-by-some Pets.com sock puppet.
What's more, Wain knows many a cute starlet, and he usually casts them in roles where he can make out with them (at the very least). Who can blame him? Elizabeth Banks (Slither, Scrubs), Jennifer Westfeldt (Kissing Jessica Stein, Notes from the Underbelly), Callie Thorne (Rescue Me), Tawny Cypress (Heroes), and Julie Bowen (Lost, Boston Legal) have all felt the brunt of Wain's on-screen affections. Rashida Jones (The Office), however, played Wain in drag.
My Damn Channel is only six month old but is churning out the funny. Other shows are run by Harry Shearer (every other voice on The Simpsons) and bizarro "teen" comedian Andy Milonakis. Artists at My Damn Channel get 100 percent creative control, which is obvious. The kinds of things Wain pulls off would never make it on regular network television (well, maybe on HBO or IFC). That lack of a filter means the average viewer has to really like the artist's sense of humor to enjoy the show. In the case of Wainy Days, count me as a fan. The "second season finale" for Wainy Days is coming in February, so catch up now.
I'd never heard of Wain until stumbling upon Wainy Days by accident, after following links for the Internet phenomenon called You Suck at Photoshop. In Wainy Days, Wain plays a fictionalized version of himself, constantly on the hunt for love. Or, just as often, sex. Non sequiturs and breaks with reality and the fourth wall are de rigueur. So is the recurring gag of pushing people down as they pass on the street.
A typical episode usually features Wain meeting a girl, getting the girl, and losing the girl in the most ridiculous way possible. For example, in "Dorvid Days," he runs off to LA to be with his online girlfriend Nora. She introduces him to her brother with "Stephen Hawking Disease." The brother gets lost and is mistaken for an ice cream cart by the ice cream guy. (Yeah, you read that right). Wain saves the brother. But the girl breaks up with Wain for the ice cream guy anyway.
And that's a polite example, one of the few that doesn't feature some over-the-top comedic violence, ridiculous sexual situations, and/or copious amounts of bodily fluids. (Did I mention it's NSFW? Seriously. Even with no nudity.)
Wain's street cred: He is the co-creator of comedy groups The State and Stella and directed the films Wet Hot American Summer and The Ten. The latter, recently released on DVD and iTunes, is heavily (but not annoyingly) pimped on all the most recent Wainy Days episodes. (And it's on my Netflix queue, believe me.)
Since Wain actually knows a ton of Hollywood talent from his films, he features actors you've actually heard of as guests on Wainy Days, including Rob Corddry (The Daily Show), Jonah Hill (SuperBad), Paul Rudd (The Ten, 40-Year-Old Virgin) and David Krumholtz (Numb3rs). And Wain is frequently helped out behind the scenes by former Stella and The State comrades such as Michael Ian Black--the man who used to be the voice of the beloved-by-some Pets.com sock puppet.
What's more, Wain knows many a cute starlet, and he usually casts them in roles where he can make out with them (at the very least). Who can blame him? Elizabeth Banks (Slither, Scrubs), Jennifer Westfeldt (Kissing Jessica Stein, Notes from the Underbelly), Callie Thorne (Rescue Me), Tawny Cypress (Heroes), and Julie Bowen (Lost, Boston Legal) have all felt the brunt of Wain's on-screen affections. Rashida Jones (The Office), however, played Wain in drag.
My Damn Channel is only six month old but is churning out the funny. Other shows are run by Harry Shearer (every other voice on The Simpsons) and bizarro "teen" comedian Andy Milonakis. Artists at My Damn Channel get 100 percent creative control, which is obvious. The kinds of things Wain pulls off would never make it on regular network television (well, maybe on HBO or IFC). That lack of a filter means the average viewer has to really like the artist's sense of humor to enjoy the show. In the case of Wainy Days, count me as a fan. The "second season finale" for Wainy Days is coming in February, so catch up now.
Wainy Days Season 3 Premiers on MyDamnChannel
We got an e-mail from the folks at MyDamnChannel, letting us know about the premier of the third season of that old Appscout favorite, Wainy Days. Eric Griffith wrote up the show back in January upon stumbling upon it after a late night You Suck at Photoshop binge (we've all been there, right?).
We caught up with Wain again a few weeks back, when he was accepting a Webby for best online comedy series, alongside the aforementioned Photoshop duo.
If you haven't seen the show yet, the good and bad news is that you can catch up with the entire series in one sitting. Fans of Wain's work with sketch groups Stella and The State pretty much know what they're in for, but if you're unfamiliar with Wain's work, it ought be mentioned that Eric typed the letters NSFW about a half-dozen times in his writeup of the show.
Check out the new season here.
We caught up with Wain again a few weeks back, when he was accepting a Webby for best online comedy series, alongside the aforementioned Photoshop duo.
If you haven't seen the show yet, the good and bad news is that you can catch up with the entire series in one sitting. Fans of Wain's work with sketch groups Stella and The State pretty much know what they're in for, but if you're unfamiliar with Wain's work, it ought be mentioned that Eric typed the letters NSFW about a half-dozen times in his writeup of the show.
Check out the new season here.
Hands On with Paglo: A Search Engine for IT
One issue that a number of small and medium-sized businesses face when managing their IT infrastructure is keeping tabs on where everything is and what condition it's all in. From the condition of desktops across the organization to the types of servers in the datacenter and what they're all running to the number of mobile devices on the network, IT departments are organizations of any size need effective and efficient ways to gather information about their environment and changes in it at a moment's notice.
Paglo can help. I've been playing with Paglo for the past several weeks since its private beta went public, and I've been hard pressed to find a better tool to collect the wealth of data that Paglo does on all aspects of a business's IT infrastructure. Add to this the number of ways that Paglo allows you to conveniently customize dashboards and reports for ease of retrieval, and you have a service that could make IT executives at a number of modestly-sized companies very happy.
Many IT departments struggle with the challenge of how to manage and collect information about their infrastructure easily. I've been involved with IT departments making the transition between small business to large enterprise, and the task is much more daunting than simply making sure to keep a solid monitoring tool on at all times. It was difficult in the course of reading about and examining Paglo to try and pigeonhole it into a specific type of tool, like a monitoring tool, a configuration management database, an alerting tool, an asset management database. The truth is that Paglo does all of these things, and unlike many applications that try to do too many things at once, Paglo does them all pretty well.
At it's heart, Paglo is a search utility, and through the types of information you can obtain through targeted searches, IT staff can greatly minimize the time required to research and obtain information about their existing systems in order to diagnose issues, track changes, or proactively find problems.
Here's how it works: a systems administrator or engineer planning to use Paglo for the IT infrastructure that they manage downloads the Paglo crawler once the company is signed up with Paglo for service. They install the crawler on their own machine or any other computer with access to the corporate network, and the crawler than traverses the corporate network, collecting information about the company's IT infrastructure and sends it back to Paglo to be kept in the company's repository. Then, authorized users and IT administrators at the company can log in to Paglo's site to begin searching and retrieving information about their company's IT environment in a matter of moments.
The search functionality is where Paglo really shines. Because the crawler can collect a wealth of information about a company's IT environment, and uses a number of protocols to collect its information, you can use Paglo to not just see how many devices the crawler has encountered, but detailed information about those devices as well. For example, the Paglo crawler uses familiar protocols like SNMP to pull configuration data from servers, switches, and routers, so you can tell that the firewall that you knew was there is actually a Juniper SSG 500. You can see with a single search how many servers you have in your datacenter, and the breakdown of which ones are running what operating systems.
It would be one thing if Paglo stopped there, but it goes on to collect more information about the devices and systems it encounters, from firmware information to model and serial information--anything a systems admin may find useful, or an Operations Manager might find important when collecting broad information about their IT environment.
Paglo may sound daunting, but the service is extremely simple. When you log in, you're presented with a search bar and a brief glimpse at your available search index, that can include as much or little information as you like. The test account I used had inventory information, running processes and active devices on the corporate network, and a list of top searches, alerts, and dashboards at the bottom of the page. If, for example, I wanted all of my desktop and laptop users to grab a copy of the newly released Firefox 3 but didn't know how many of them already had it, I could simply type "Firefox" in the search bar to find any and all systems with Firefox in its configuration information. If I read about a vulnerability that's corrected by a specific Windows Server 2003 patch, I can see how many servers are missing it by searching for the patch number. I can even search for "devices by subnet" to see all of the devices on my network organized by their network segment.
As you perform searches that you think you'll do often, you can save those searches as "dashboards" that can be referred to quickly by any corporate user that logs into Paglo. The dashboards are available with one click from the sidebar menu, and the test account that I was given showed useful information like server CPU utilization, free disk space on all of the test company's servers, active alerts, and overall inventory of workstations, servers, printers, and other devices. Being able to access this type of information, like how much free disk space is available on xyz server, is critical to system administrations when trying to diagnose a problem. Being able to see this information easily in one tool without having to physically log on to the server to investigate can save time and energy. Being able to see how much free disk space is available across your entire datacenter however, can be a lifesaver and is critical reporting information for an IT department's internal customers at any business.
In addition to dashboards, you can turn your searches into alerts that will contact critical IT personnel when changes occur in your IT environment. For example, you can set Paglo to notify you when disk space gets low on a critical server, when a switch or router stops responding, or even something more nuanced like when a network printer is out of paper or a certain undesirable application appears on a system on your network.
Paglo offers its software as a service, meaning that Paglo hosts the application and its interface on their own and provides companies access to it for subscription fees. During its private beta, the company managed to sign up over 800 businesses, including universities, hospitals, and construction companies. The service is aimed primarily at businesses of small-to-medium sizes with about 50-1000 employees and IT resources that match up with those people.
The Paglo crawler is completely open source, so as the service gains traction in your organization, you can design plug-ins and add-ons to supplement the crawler's data collection abilities. Additionally, part of the benefit of Paglo offering its software as a service is that you have a broad community of Paglo users to share information with and draw knowledge from. If another company uising Paglo has developed an add-on that scans firewalls for active rulesets, that company can then publish the add-on to the Paglo community where other companies can then download it, use it, and even improve on it and re-post it.
Paglo calls these add-ons and tips "Share-Its," and encourages companies using the service to help each other solve difficult IT questions using Paglo, share their experiences using the service and how it's helped them manage their IT infrastructure, and even post the share-its they've developed for use in other organizations. Best of all, no company-specific data is posted with the share-it, just the add-on itself.
Security might be the only area that might make some companies a little wary of a service like Paglo. Because the service is hosted by Paglo and presented by Paglo to users, and because of the nature of a crawler like the one that collects information about your network and infrastructure and sends it to Paglo, some IT security personnel might need to be sold on the benefits of sending all of that sometimes sensitive technology information off-site to a third-party, even if it makes the environment easier to manage. Paglo makes every effort to keep company specific information private, but that may not be enough for some businesses who simply don't want to risk someone else knowing what they have in their datacenters or what applications their developers use or create. Paglo has no plans to offer their service to companies to deploy in-house, but when I asked about the issue of information security and possibly providing their search functionality to customers in-house, the response I got indicated that the door might be open to that type of offering in the future.
When I had the opportunity to speak to Paglo CEO Brian de Haaff and CTO Christopher Waters, they beamed about the broad functionality of their service and how valuable the information that Paglo collects could be to IT departments. The goal, they explained, is to provide a service that helps IT departments at small and mid-sized businesses that are often understaffed wrangle and manage increasingly complex IT environments and provide on-demand information about their applications, platforms, and infrastructure. Paglo is in open beta at the moment, and companies can sign up to use the service for free through the rest of the summer.
Paglo can help. I've been playing with Paglo for the past several weeks since its private beta went public, and I've been hard pressed to find a better tool to collect the wealth of data that Paglo does on all aspects of a business's IT infrastructure. Add to this the number of ways that Paglo allows you to conveniently customize dashboards and reports for ease of retrieval, and you have a service that could make IT executives at a number of modestly-sized companies very happy.
Many IT departments struggle with the challenge of how to manage and collect information about their infrastructure easily. I've been involved with IT departments making the transition between small business to large enterprise, and the task is much more daunting than simply making sure to keep a solid monitoring tool on at all times. It was difficult in the course of reading about and examining Paglo to try and pigeonhole it into a specific type of tool, like a monitoring tool, a configuration management database, an alerting tool, an asset management database. The truth is that Paglo does all of these things, and unlike many applications that try to do too many things at once, Paglo does them all pretty well.
At it's heart, Paglo is a search utility, and through the types of information you can obtain through targeted searches, IT staff can greatly minimize the time required to research and obtain information about their existing systems in order to diagnose issues, track changes, or proactively find problems.
Here's how it works: a systems administrator or engineer planning to use Paglo for the IT infrastructure that they manage downloads the Paglo crawler once the company is signed up with Paglo for service. They install the crawler on their own machine or any other computer with access to the corporate network, and the crawler than traverses the corporate network, collecting information about the company's IT infrastructure and sends it back to Paglo to be kept in the company's repository. Then, authorized users and IT administrators at the company can log in to Paglo's site to begin searching and retrieving information about their company's IT environment in a matter of moments.
The search functionality is where Paglo really shines. Because the crawler can collect a wealth of information about a company's IT environment, and uses a number of protocols to collect its information, you can use Paglo to not just see how many devices the crawler has encountered, but detailed information about those devices as well. For example, the Paglo crawler uses familiar protocols like SNMP to pull configuration data from servers, switches, and routers, so you can tell that the firewall that you knew was there is actually a Juniper SSG 500. You can see with a single search how many servers you have in your datacenter, and the breakdown of which ones are running what operating systems.
It would be one thing if Paglo stopped there, but it goes on to collect more information about the devices and systems it encounters, from firmware information to model and serial information--anything a systems admin may find useful, or an Operations Manager might find important when collecting broad information about their IT environment.
Paglo may sound daunting, but the service is extremely simple. When you log in, you're presented with a search bar and a brief glimpse at your available search index, that can include as much or little information as you like. The test account I used had inventory information, running processes and active devices on the corporate network, and a list of top searches, alerts, and dashboards at the bottom of the page. If, for example, I wanted all of my desktop and laptop users to grab a copy of the newly released Firefox 3 but didn't know how many of them already had it, I could simply type "Firefox" in the search bar to find any and all systems with Firefox in its configuration information. If I read about a vulnerability that's corrected by a specific Windows Server 2003 patch, I can see how many servers are missing it by searching for the patch number. I can even search for "devices by subnet" to see all of the devices on my network organized by their network segment.
As you perform searches that you think you'll do often, you can save those searches as "dashboards" that can be referred to quickly by any corporate user that logs into Paglo. The dashboards are available with one click from the sidebar menu, and the test account that I was given showed useful information like server CPU utilization, free disk space on all of the test company's servers, active alerts, and overall inventory of workstations, servers, printers, and other devices. Being able to access this type of information, like how much free disk space is available on xyz server, is critical to system administrations when trying to diagnose a problem. Being able to see this information easily in one tool without having to physically log on to the server to investigate can save time and energy. Being able to see how much free disk space is available across your entire datacenter however, can be a lifesaver and is critical reporting information for an IT department's internal customers at any business.
In addition to dashboards, you can turn your searches into alerts that will contact critical IT personnel when changes occur in your IT environment. For example, you can set Paglo to notify you when disk space gets low on a critical server, when a switch or router stops responding, or even something more nuanced like when a network printer is out of paper or a certain undesirable application appears on a system on your network.
Paglo offers its software as a service, meaning that Paglo hosts the application and its interface on their own and provides companies access to it for subscription fees. During its private beta, the company managed to sign up over 800 businesses, including universities, hospitals, and construction companies. The service is aimed primarily at businesses of small-to-medium sizes with about 50-1000 employees and IT resources that match up with those people.
The Paglo crawler is completely open source, so as the service gains traction in your organization, you can design plug-ins and add-ons to supplement the crawler's data collection abilities. Additionally, part of the benefit of Paglo offering its software as a service is that you have a broad community of Paglo users to share information with and draw knowledge from. If another company uising Paglo has developed an add-on that scans firewalls for active rulesets, that company can then publish the add-on to the Paglo community where other companies can then download it, use it, and even improve on it and re-post it.
Paglo calls these add-ons and tips "Share-Its," and encourages companies using the service to help each other solve difficult IT questions using Paglo, share their experiences using the service and how it's helped them manage their IT infrastructure, and even post the share-its they've developed for use in other organizations. Best of all, no company-specific data is posted with the share-it, just the add-on itself.
Security might be the only area that might make some companies a little wary of a service like Paglo. Because the service is hosted by Paglo and presented by Paglo to users, and because of the nature of a crawler like the one that collects information about your network and infrastructure and sends it to Paglo, some IT security personnel might need to be sold on the benefits of sending all of that sometimes sensitive technology information off-site to a third-party, even if it makes the environment easier to manage. Paglo makes every effort to keep company specific information private, but that may not be enough for some businesses who simply don't want to risk someone else knowing what they have in their datacenters or what applications their developers use or create. Paglo has no plans to offer their service to companies to deploy in-house, but when I asked about the issue of information security and possibly providing their search functionality to customers in-house, the response I got indicated that the door might be open to that type of offering in the future.
When I had the opportunity to speak to Paglo CEO Brian de Haaff and CTO Christopher Waters, they beamed about the broad functionality of their service and how valuable the information that Paglo collects could be to IT departments. The goal, they explained, is to provide a service that helps IT departments at small and mid-sized businesses that are often understaffed wrangle and manage increasingly complex IT environments and provide on-demand information about their applications, platforms, and infrastructure. Paglo is in open beta at the moment, and companies can sign up to use the service for free through the rest of the summer.
iTunes Store Hits 5 Billion Downloads
They may have seen a good deal of increased competition, as of late from the likes of mega retailers like Amazon, but Apple's iTunes store doesn't look like it'll be going away any time soon. The country's number one music retailer announced today that it had surpassed five billion downloads.
The online media store isn't doing too shabbily on the movie front, either. Users are currently purchasing 50,000 movies per day through iTunes, making it the world's most popular online movie store as well.
Now if only people would start buying iPods...
The online media store isn't doing too shabbily on the movie front, either. Users are currently purchasing 50,000 movies per day through iTunes, making it the world's most popular online movie store as well.
Now if only people would start buying iPods...
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Meez Launches Meez Nation, A Virtual World
Meez, a social entertainment community that allows users to create their own 3D animated avatars to socialize and play games, just announced the launched of its new virtual world, Meez Nation.
"The number one request from our community of more than 7 million users has been to add a virtual world," says Sean Ryan, CEO of Meez. "Meez Nation is a significant addition to our already potent mix of 3D avatars, a virtual economy and casual games. It will significantly boost user involvement and brand engagement on Meez."
You can use Meez Nation to explore a variety of neighborhoods, including public hangouts and personal Roomz that can be custom decorated and shared with friends. You can also stroll though the beaches of Chillville, walk in the wealthy area of Posh Heights, hang out in the metropolitan Uptown, cool down at a paradise called Arcadia, party at Hell's Kitchen, or stick around in the entry point neighborhood, Burbia.
The game includes the option to visit 50 Cent's Virtual Office to listen to songs from the artist's upcoming album. This room also allows you to participate in an animated rap battle and to purchase 50 Cent's music on iTunes through a provided link.
In the Roomz and neighborhoods of Meez Nation, you can chat among each other, listen to music, watch YouTube videos, and leave answering machine messages. In order to purchase items, you can also use Coinz, Meez Nation's virtual currency.
It appears that Meez Nation is providing a fun platform for teenagers and young adults to engage in, but how long will this virtual-world craze last? I think the success of Meez Nation will be dependent on how much the virtual world keeps up with the real world.
"The number one request from our community of more than 7 million users has been to add a virtual world," says Sean Ryan, CEO of Meez. "Meez Nation is a significant addition to our already potent mix of 3D avatars, a virtual economy and casual games. It will significantly boost user involvement and brand engagement on Meez."
You can use Meez Nation to explore a variety of neighborhoods, including public hangouts and personal Roomz that can be custom decorated and shared with friends. You can also stroll though the beaches of Chillville, walk in the wealthy area of Posh Heights, hang out in the metropolitan Uptown, cool down at a paradise called Arcadia, party at Hell's Kitchen, or stick around in the entry point neighborhood, Burbia.
The game includes the option to visit 50 Cent's Virtual Office to listen to songs from the artist's upcoming album. This room also allows you to participate in an animated rap battle and to purchase 50 Cent's music on iTunes through a provided link.
In the Roomz and neighborhoods of Meez Nation, you can chat among each other, listen to music, watch YouTube videos, and leave answering machine messages. In order to purchase items, you can also use Coinz, Meez Nation's virtual currency.
It appears that Meez Nation is providing a fun platform for teenagers and young adults to engage in, but how long will this virtual-world craze last? I think the success of Meez Nation will be dependent on how much the virtual world keeps up with the real world.
Customer Service 101: Microsoft Deletes MSN Music Servers
Remember when you heeded the music industry's piracy warnings, and eschewed file-sharing services such as Napster to purchase your music legally via the MSN Music Store?
Looks like taking your chances with the RIAA might have been a better option. As of August 31, Microsoft will delete its MSN Music license servers, so music purchased from the now-defunct MSN Music Store will be accessible only via the five computers you authorized to play the tunes.
Buying a new computer or upgrading your operating system? Say goodbye to your music. The music restrictions do not just apply to new computers. If you upgrade from Windows XP to Vista, your MSN Music Store music will be gone.
"As of August 31, 2008, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers," according to a Microsoft customer e-mail. "You will need to obtain a license key for each of your songs downloaded from MSN Music on any new computer, and you must do so before August 31, 2008. If you attempt to transfer your songs to additional computers after August 31, 2008, those songs will not successfully play."
Microsoft launched the MSN Music Store in September, 2004, in an effort to compete with Apple's iTunes, but it never made much of a dent in iTunes' business. Two years later, Microsoft started redirecting MSN Music Store shoppers to the Zune Marketplace.
Looks like taking your chances with the RIAA might have been a better option. As of August 31, Microsoft will delete its MSN Music license servers, so music purchased from the now-defunct MSN Music Store will be accessible only via the five computers you authorized to play the tunes.
Buying a new computer or upgrading your operating system? Say goodbye to your music. The music restrictions do not just apply to new computers. If you upgrade from Windows XP to Vista, your MSN Music Store music will be gone.
"As of August 31, 2008, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers," according to a Microsoft customer e-mail. "You will need to obtain a license key for each of your songs downloaded from MSN Music on any new computer, and you must do so before August 31, 2008. If you attempt to transfer your songs to additional computers after August 31, 2008, those songs will not successfully play."
Microsoft launched the MSN Music Store in September, 2004, in an effort to compete with Apple's iTunes, but it never made much of a dent in iTunes' business. Two years later, Microsoft started redirecting MSN Music Store shoppers to the Zune Marketplace.
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