TuneIn has quietly turned itself into a powerhouse in the music streaming business. For those not familiar with TuneIn, it is a service and app that streams terrestrial radio stations from around the world over the Internet, similar to competitor iheartradio. In app form, the two services do diverge in their secondary offerings with iheartradio offering Pandora-like custom stations based on songs or artists and TuneIn allowing users to create custom stations by inputting a streaming URL or adding podcasts as stations. Venture capital funding is not usually a big topic here at Missing Remote, but in this case it is good to see TuneIn securing its future as they have done right by HTPC fans looking to add terrestrial radio content to their systems in the past. TuneIn, formerly known as RadioTime, continues to offer their plug-ins for a variety of front-ends including Windows Media Center, Media Portal, and Kylo. Admittedly, they have not continued to develop these plug-ins, but whenever I build a new WMC system, the RadioTime plug-in, aged though it may be, is one of the first that I add if only for the talk radio stations. Having secured funding to grow its business and a solid relationship with traditional broadcasters, TuneIn could be well-positioned to diversify its service offerings and compete more directly with a variety of big name streaming music service simultaneously.
With a reported 30 million monthly unique users, the bragging rights of being the top iOS music app last October and a slew of newly releasedauto integrations at CES, the under-the-radar TuneIn is sitting pretty. The service, which like iheartradio takes terrestrial radio stations and streams them online, differentiates itself from other contenders in the music space like Pandora and Spotify by offering up traditional radio mainstays like DJs and contests, etc.
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Logitech has released their financial report for Q3 2012. Mixed in among the numbers and trends were a couple of interesting nuggets. First of all, Logitech is stating that they have sold out of new Logitech Revue units. This does not necessarily mean that the sales channel is clear yet, but it does mean that they are getting scarce fast and there will be no more to replenish shelves. Despite having to issue profit warnings a couple of times this quarter, the company is operating in the black and expects to finish the year that way. This is sure to be a welcome relief given that the Logitech Revue was blamed for the big splashes of red ink on Logitech's ledgers last year and the company must be happy to be able to wash their hands of the whole thing.
Keeping with the trend of allowing users to consume Netflix on a variety of devices. Netflix has revealed that it is now compatible on more than 800 devices. This is more than double the amount of devices in which it was available on last year. Perhaps in response to the increased available of Netflix enabled devices Netflix also revealed user usage patterns which indicated a shift away from viewing Netflix through a console to direct viewing through enabled smart TV's and tablets.
I saw the new UI that comes with 1.5 while at CES and found it to be a big improvement over previous revs. Besides that, the biggest feature "get" is probably support for live ATSC via the optional dongle, but those still having issues with HBR audio will have to wait however.
The launch of Windows 95 was a big deal for Microsoft. They licensed the Rolling Stone's "Start Me Up" for the commercials, had computer stores hosting midnight launches, and generally whipped up the kind of frenzy that only Call of Duty can muster in the software aisles these days. I, however, was dissatisfied. I wanted Windows NT. I wanted the stability, the NTFS file system, and the "true" 32-bit architectural underpinnings of Windows NT. I stuck with Windows 95 because Windows NT, by and large, was not suitable for gaming. Dave Cutler, the lead engineer during Windows NT's development and a major player in the development of Windows Azure has moved to Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business division to work on the Xbox. I don't imagine that Dave Cutler has suddenly become more interested in gaming than he was during the development of Windows NT or in media streaming which seems to be the real focus of Xbox development these days, so it begs the question, what is Dave Cutler doing working on the Xbox? I have a couple of theories that I have kicked around for a few years about how Microsoft might eventually turn the Xbox into a general computing platform, and an engineer like Dave Cutler would be just the person to lead such an effort. Anyone else have any thoughts on what Microsoft might be cooking up?
The floods in Thailand last year displaced over 12 million people and left large swathes of the country underwater, including factories that produced a large percentage of the world's hard drives and hard drive components. Western Digital, the hard drive manufacturer most affected by the flooding, has been working to restore production and between their reconstruction efforts in Thailand and new factories coming online in Malaysia, Western Digital expects to restore production to pre-flood levels by September. A number of major tech companies, including Intel and Microsoft, have pinned the blame for recent weakness in the PC market on hard drive shortages caused by the flooding. Certainly, anyone looking to add storage to their HTPC or home server has seen the effect of the shortages on hard drive prices.
