Has anyone heard what the 20mil will be used for?
Another question:
I wonder if MCF has a deal with Sony or only Sony Canada?
news.com
Microsoft, Sony in Internet Music and Video Venture (Update1)
Bloomberg News
May 12, 1999, 9:48 a.m. PT
Microsoft, Sony in Internet Music and Video Venture (Update1)
(Adds analyst comments in 4th and 9th paragraphs. Updates
share prices.)
Redmond, Washington, May 12 (Bloomberg) -- Microsoft Corp.
and Sony Corp. said they will jointly distribute music and videos
over the Internet, the latest move by a record company to counter
piracy and stake a claim to the emerging online-music market.
Internet users will able to buy single songs or watch videos
by Sony Music Entertainment's most popular artists using
Microsoft's Windows Media 4.0 software when it's available this
summer. Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, and Sony
Music, one of the five biggest music companies, hope the alliance
will satisfy music appetites while promoting Sony artists.
Music companies, in collaboration with technology companies,
are scrambling to develop ways to distribute music online in ways
that protect their copyrights and royalties. Technologies such as
MP3 allow an estimated 3 million CD-quality music tracks to be
downloaded each day, most of them for free.
''It's a step forward for another major record company as we
move away from talk of piracy and raise it to the level of
commercial viability,'' said Mark Hardie, an entertainment
analyst at Forrester Research Inc., a technology market-research
company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The rising popularity of MP3 and the introduction of
portable MP3 players such as Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc.'s
Rio have caused music-industry officials to fear pirated music
could cut sales of compact discs and tape cassettes.
Their response could yield an online-music market that ''is
likely to be a billion-dollar industry'' around 2003, compared
with ''maybe'' $1 million now, Hardie said.
Microsoft shares rose 1 1/8 to 81 in early afternoon
trading. Sony American depositary receipts, each representing one
share of the No. 2 consumer-electronics company, rose 1/4 to
93 1/4.
'More Deals'
The Microsoft-Sony alliance comes a few days after news
reports said AT&T Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co.,
Bertelsmann AG's BMG Entertainment unit and Seagram Co.'s
Universal Music Group are close to forming an alliance to develop
a system to distribute music over the Internet.
Last week, Universal Music said it would start selling
digital music online later this year and announced a partnership
with InterTrust Technologies Corp. to provide online security.
InterTrust is a closely held company that makes software to help
deliver and protect online information.
''Watch this space -- there will be plenty more deals to
come,'' said Simon Dyson, a music market analyst at Market
Tracking International in London. Dyson compared the situation to
''athletes at the start of a race, jockeying for positions.''
Microsoft said its software will comply with requirements
under development by the Secure Digital Music Initiative, a group
of about 150 companies that seeks to protect copyrighted music.
Internet-related music sales leaped to $143 million in 1998
from $29 million in 1997. While Internet sales were less than
0.5 percent of total music sold last year, that could rise to
about 8 percent in about five years, according to MTI. The retail
value of worldwide music sales rose to $40 billion from
$38.8 million in 1997.
SDMI is backed by the world's five biggest record companies
-- Sony Music, BMG Entertainment, EMI Group Plc's EMI Recorded
Music, Seagram's Universal Music Group, and Time Warner Inc.'s
Warner Music Group.
The guidelines are supported by Sony, AT&T Corp., America
Online Inc. and other top technology companies.
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