So am I, sam.
The acquisitions of Spinner and Nullsoft are very shrewd of AOL, not unlike ICQ a year ago. Haven't studied the press reports yet, but this initiative seems less a threat to BCST than it does to RNWK. These deals seem to be about users, facilities and tools (including the potential for proprietary e-commerce), not about control of content. What will be interesting is to see what AOL does for an encore. Its work has just begun.
With Nullsoft's player, Winamp, AOL now owns an "open standard" platform that's competitive with RNWK's MP3 thrust (through the acquisition of Xing) and comes with a huge following. (Incidentally, among geeks, Winamp is no longer thought to be the best player, but well over 15mm downloads have been logged.) For Net broadcasting, however, Nullsoft's SHOUTcast system (streaming MP3) is sort of a toy in that it doesn't scale well. You can Webcast to something like 29 users per SHOUTcast server with a broadband connection, pretty wimpy. Still, while not of commercial quality, it's cute for consumers, AOL's main market segment.
To my knowledge, Nullsoft has nothing proprietary going for it on the MP3 encoding side, so there seems to be no particular threat to the value of RNWK's purchase of Xing.
Telos Systems (private), which we've discussed here, seems to have scalable streaming MP3 figured out with its Audioactive system. It would appear to be up for grabs.
If you'll recall, we had recommended here a few months ago that RNWK take out Nullsoft, if only to remove a future threat. Alas, Glaser didn't listen...
Spinner is actually the producer of Yahoo! Radio (exclusively in RNWK format), so it's interesting that AOL will now own it. (Viacom now owns its nearest competitor, Imagine.) AOL and YHOO are not necessarily enemies, however. There's been recent talk of some potentially bold strategic alliances between them.
Another piece of the puzzle is MP3.com, which has filed an IPO. Would be nice to see RNWK (or at least YHOO) take out this player before it goes somewhere else.
So, some questions arise. Can "your father's" AOL rise to the challenges of its increasing commitments to the software/technology side of the business? How will AOL secure its future in streaming video (still missing in action)? What does the acquisition of Nullsoft do to AOL's previously cozy relationship with RNWK? Who will end up with MP3.com? And where does Telos, the apparent applied technology leader of streaming MP3, fit in?
As always, we'll focus closely on the implications of these developments.
BAM |
