It's Rishi

This afternoon, Yahoo! sent me a friendly reminder that my Yahoo Music Unlimited annual subscription is up for renewal in a month. I had signed up for Yahoo Music right when it came out a couple years ago and I must admit it’s been an awesome companion for me. Having access to well over a million songs across all kinds of genres has introduced me to a lot of new artists that I hadn’t been famliar with and also given me the chance to listen to the full albums of artists I already was a fan of. The downside is that the Yahoo Music application is pretty slow and clunky. Also, while the star-rating recommendation system does an OK job at pushing me music that might fit my taste, it would be nice to have more help, such as having some better social features or more editorial content.

After reading reviews about other music subscription services that have launched over the past couple of years, I thought I’d do some quick research before renewing. A couple of my friends have Rhapsody and say really great things about the service. Also, in this CNET review from a couple weeks ago, they named Rhapsody their Editor’s Choice amongst competing services. One of the best features of Rhapsody is the team of music editors which write commentary on the various artists and genres. Rhapsody does cost a little bit more but the difference is only a few dollars a month. I became really tempted to make the switch – if for no other reason than to have a change of scenery.

Then it hit me. I have now rated over 2k songs, artists, and albums on Yahoo Music. Those ratings represents thousands of hours of music listening for me and represent a deep description of my music taste. When browsing music it helps me sort out music that I have and have not listened to. Furthermore, in a sense I’m sort of proud of my ratings. I’ve put in a lot of time creating those ratings and since my music taste is a big part of my identity, hence my music ratings are a big party of my identity. I don’t want to lose those ratings. As is typical of big portal sites, there’s no way to export my music rating data. In all fairness though, import/export is not supported by any of the services and since they presumably use different music databases, it’s not even clear if an import/export could reliably be done.

The bottom line is that I don’t want to lose my ratings so the switching cost for me is impossibly high (I’d have to manually transfer my ratings one-by-one).
It turns out that there is actually a very good reminder here for consumer services. The deeper a customer can personalize the service, the higher the switching cost is.

Anyway, in conclusion, for the time being I’m Yahoo Music’s bitch. I’ll be renewing for another year…

It sure didn’t take long for Yahoo! to rebrand the media center and DVR software they recently purchased from Meedio. The result is Yahoo! Go Beta. It pretty much has the standard features you expect: photo managing/viewing (via Flickr and Y! Photos…kinda cool), watch video content from Y! video search and also some Hollywood teasers, and stream music from their Launchcast radio service. All of this, of course, is designed for users who have their PC’s hooked up to a TV. This immediately makes Go a niche, albeit growing in appeal, market product. However, what is important to point out is that Go does bring media center functionality to the vast majority of Windows users who are running XP Pro or Home, not the special MCE. That is huge. There has been some media center software packages in the open source community, such as MythTV, but for reasons such as lack of awareness and setup difficulties, they have generally gotten interest only from the geek community.

Initial comments of Go have generally been satisfactory at best with most people indicating that MCE is without a doubt the superior product. That isn’t a huge surprise since MCE has been around for a while now. Clearly, Go is unlikely to be successful if it’s simply a cheaper, but-not-as-good alternative to MCE. You can expect that much of this functionality will be in all versions of Vista and will server as a death sentence to Go if Y! can’t innovate to justify the product’s existence. So how can they innovate?

1) Add wireless streaming functionality – Streaming multimedia content to cellular phones and other wireless handheld devices is gaining traction fast as devices are getting more powerful and broadband cellular networks are becoming ubiquitous and cheap to access. Orb has been offering a free download which enables exactly this functionality from any Windows PC. You can stream your music and video (including recorded DVD content) to wireless devices. The best part is that it’s free and relatively easy to setup. Y! should license this technology and bring it to Go ASAP. The reports are that Vista will have this functionality as well, but Y! can beat them to the punch. Also, you can bet that Microsoft’s implementation will be anal about DRM issues as well as being incompatible with DivX/Xvid out-of-the-box.

2) Create special versions of Y!’s other properties to Go. I want to see Y! Games, Fantasy Sports, News, Mail, and Finance. Sure, since you’ve got your PC hooked up to the TV, you could just fire up your web browser, but because the TV environment is so different from the PC (in terms of screen resolution, viewing distance, input devices), it’d be a lot better to create new UI’s designed specifically for access via a TV. Imagine having customized Financial news broadcasted to you on your TV. Forget the Bloomberg channel, let’s focus on my portfolio and the markets that I’m interested in. Why not overlay my league’s realtime fantasy sports stats on top of the game that I’m watching right now. If you’re like me, when you’re watching TV, you probably have your laptop in front of you. If done right, a marriage of interactive content with broadcast content would shock and awe the TV viewing masses.

3) Integrate simple BitTorrent search and client software. Okay, Okay, this one is pretty controversial since that may suggest Y! endorsing piracy. For me though, BitTorrent is the only DVR I need. I’ve talked about it before but with the combination of BitTorrent and RSS, I have access to all the shows I want, when i want them regardless of whether I get the channel or remembered to record it. Again, I could just use the software I have on my PC already but a simplified, TV-based interface (integrated with TV Guide listings!!! *gasp*) would make it a lot more accessible to mainstream folks.

4) Add video phone functionality. I’d much rather use my TV to engage in video telephony instead of my PC. Y! could do a promotion on webcams. To begin with, they could just support between two Go users. Down the road, maybe somehow tie this in with Y!’s VOIP service and maybe there’s some interesting interopability that may be possible.

I think it’s exciting that another big player is stepping up to this space. Competition should spur some much-needed innovation. All the necesary pieces (broadband in the home, broadband on our phones, HDTV, digital video content everywhere) that we’ve been dreaming about for a decade now is here and it’s about time we try to bring convergence to the masses.

UPDATE: For some screenshots of the user experience with Go, click here and here