Although Netflix will try to make a streaming-only service work abroad, the company really doesn't think there's a demand for this type of offering within the U.S. In fact, when responding to a reporter's question regarding Netflix's plans for an a la carte option (there isn't one), Hastings said that while they're "open-minded to" an a la carte service that came without the DVD option, the company hasn't seen much interest in something of that nature in the States. "Everybody also wants to get DVDs," said Hastings. "All the new releases are on DVD, the vast catalog is on DVD. When there is demand, it will make sense for us to meet that demand for streaming only."

...But There is Demand for Streaming-Only

While that may be true - people do want the new releases - the demand for the physical media is arguably an artificial one created by the entertainment industry. Studios simply refuse to offer their movies and TV shows via Netflix's on-demand streaming library until they've been able to pull in a nice profit from disk sales first. This, in turn, forces consumers to not only purchase but also desire the DVD-by-mail part of the Netflix service as opposed to a separate, unbundled option of on-demand content only.

In other words, to say that the demand for streaming-only doesn't exist isn't exactly accurate. After all, Netflix reported that their streaming stats are now at an all-time high with 42% of subscribers having streamed at least 15 minutes of one TV show or movie during the last quarter. This number is up from 22% during the same period last year. Considering that Netflix's subscriber base itself has grown 28% over the past year, this figure means that the raw count of subscribers actively engaged in streaming has now more than doubled over last year. Hastings even said himself that the numbers were "a good marker of increasing streaming adoption."

Although the demand for new releases would probably have many subscribers sticking with the hybrid DVD/streaming service, by forgoing a streaming-only option it seems that the company is overlooking an opportunity to pick up a sizable group of more casual users. There are likely a number of people who would appreciate the option to pay a little less in order to to gain access to the on-demand content only - content which includes a much smaller catalog than what's available by mail. Given the company's integrations into game consoles, set-top boxes and even some TVs, there's actually no need to even own a DVD player anymore to watch Netflix movies. The content is on-demand.

Streaming media is the future, not physical disks. Hollywood knows this too, but as with the music industry, they're fighting tooth-and-nail to keep the old business model afloat for as long as possible. So far, it's working. As long as they control the method of distribution and keep it limited to physical media it will look like DVDs are what the people want. But the people really want streams. From music (Pandora, Spotify) to TV (Hulu, iPlayer) and yes, to movies via Netflix, streaming media is rapidly becoming the method of choice for many of today's consumers. The future is an on-demand world and Hollywood would do better to figure that out now than try to delay the inevitable.

Additionally, Bonnain went on to point out the Grooveshark artists community and quiet honestly, we were thrilled to discover it. Beyond the fantastic experience of the music discovery engine and the listener-focused features of the site, Grooveshark actually has a Bandcamp-style service for artists to promote themselves.

The Artist Dashboard allows bands to track their most popular songs, fan favorite play lists and measure play counts. Additionally, Grooveshark also allows bands to sell merchandise via Junkytees and TuniPop, license music via Creative Commons, land deals via YouLicense and crowdsource album funding via SellABand.

Within the artist's environment, Grooveshark monetizes its service by offering musicians a chance to have their music advertised and played alongside similar bands. With more than 7 million tracks in its catalogue, the company is effectively leveraging its size and existing audience to make a case as the premier destination for artist promotion. Artists can expect to see their tracks in community playlists and distributed via widgets, links and soon, through mobile playlists.

While Spotify's iPhone application has received a ton of buzz for its ability to play cached music streams, Grooveshark also has an iPhone application in the works. While the app's current iteration does not allow for offline play, Bonnain assures ReadWriteWeb that the feature is in the mobile developer pipeline and it won't cost $15 a month to try it when it arrives.

While both Grooveshark and Spotify's premium subscription programs are in their infancy, it will be interesting to see which service will find the right features and licensing partnerships to come out on top.

After signing up for Audiolizer, you only have to export your iTunes library and upload it to the service. We tried this out with a relatively small, 1000 song library, and Audiolizer was able to import almost all of them. Unlike Lala, however, which offers a similar service, Audiolizer does not upload and store any of your songs that are missing from its database.

This, however, is typically not a major problem, as Audiolizer is able to draw upon a very large database of songs. While Audiolizer bills itself as a streaming music service, it actually gets its music (and accompanying videos) from YouTube. For some reason, however, Audiolizer downplays this reliance on Google's popular video sharing site and the videos are not even linked to their original YouTube pages and only appear in a very small window.

One feature we would still like to see is the ability to share your playlists with friends. Audiolizer is also still working on a music suggestion feature, which should be available shortly. Even without these, however, Audiolizer is definitely a music service worth trying.

We don't really expect Apple to create a web-based iTunes anytime soon. Why should they? The company's iPods and iPhones dominate the mp3 player market and are locked down so that they, in theory, could only work with the company's iTunes software.

Could SoundCloud Set Us Free?

But then we saw the player from SoundCloud, the company that "moves music." Until now, SoundCloud has been focusing on their service that lets musicians and fans freely distribute and share tracks with each other via the web. Using widget-based dropboxes combined with a social network of fellow music fans, SoundCloud makes it simple to move large files over the web without having to resort to FTP, bitTorrent, or other complicated services.

Right now, their new Cloud Player doesn't do all that much, we'll admit. In fact, we're sorry to say that it actually seems overwhelmed and broken. When trying to create a playlist, we just see the spinning circle. When we tried to play a track, all we got was a message: "transferring data from api.soundcloud.com." Obviously, this app is nowhere near ready for primetime. It looks like a great idea, sure, but one that's only a pretty picture of what could be. We love that idea, though - an app for finding and playing tracks, discovering music, saving playlists, even creating smart playlists - all in the cloud.

Yet with the Cloud Player's iTunes-like interface, we could begin to imagine a new world where music could be shared, distributed, organized, and played, all over the web. The only missing piece to total music domination is device support. Assuming the Cloud Player ever worked, how could we get the music from the web to our iPods and iPhones?

The easy answer would be iPhone app, of course. But given that SoundCloud's service is essentially a new platform for music distribution and discovery, it would actually be a competitor to iTunes, and Apple doesn't tend to approve apps that offer competing services. To get approval, they would have to integrate with iTunes somehow, perhaps by presenting links to purchase songs in the iTunes online store. Alternately, they could forgo the iTunes App Store altogether and build something for the open-source Android OS instead...no worries about app approval there.

Yes, It's Broken...But Is It Unique?

Let's backtrack a little. We see that the Cloud Player is simply not a worthwhile app just yet. It doesn't even work, so why are we bothering to review it? The answer is because SoundCloud, the company behind the app, is doing something different that many other online music streaming services do not: distribution and monitoring. Let me explain...

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we love services like Lala, The Hype Machine, and Last.fm for example. Hype Machine tracks mp3 blogs, Last.fm uses free music to encourage legal music sales, but Lala looks the most promising for a true move to the cloud. At least, so far. The company's latest business model revolves around not just being your "jukebox in the sky" but letting you own tracks for streaming forever. 10 cents per track. $1 per album. With four major labels on board and lots of indies, the catalog looks good.

But how does Lala amass its music collection? From you, the user, uploading your mp3s to the web. Lala gives you the rights to the unlimited streaming of your own tracks, and everything else can be streamed just once. Combine that with an iPhone app and you've routed around iTunes altogether. (Guess that's why it's not approved yet).

Lala has it all except for one thing: the source of the tracks themselves - they had to come from somewhere, right? You probably either torrented them or purchased them...possibly even from iTunes. For Lala to beat iTunes at its own game, Lala needs direct access to the artists and their music.

That's where SoundCloud is different. With their service that "moves music," an artist could upload a track to SoundCloud, which then could immediately become available in your web-based iTunes replacement app (The Cloud Player), and perhaps then it could be instantly streamed over your mobile device, too. Meanwhile, when you're on your desktop or netbook, you only need browse to the cloud player's web site to have a fully functional music management tool where you make playlists, share them with friends, and seek out new music. Combine that with Lala's and Last.fm's model which lets you stream tracks for free to encourage purchases, and you have a system that no longer needs the desktop, the music labels, proprietary software or hardware. In addition, on the flip side, the artists using SoundCloud can track the distribution of their tracks, the number of plays, and more.

Sounds great, right? Well, if only it worked. The Cloud Player is open source, though. Maybe you can fix it?

Boxee, which is still in private beta testing, is a media center solution that allows you to play back content from third-party providers like Hulu, CBS, Comedy Central, or Last.fm through a very slick interface.

Open-Source on the Apple TV

Most of the hype around Boxee right now is due to the fact that it can be installed on an Apple TV, which greatly extends the functionality of these devices.

As Boxee is an open-source program, developers can easily extend the functionality of the application and develop plugins for it. Boxee's back-end is based on the open-source xbmc media center project.

The Firefox of Media Centers

Fred Wilson calls Boxee the "Firefox of the media center software sector," and judging from what we have seen of it so far, we would have to agree.

According to Boxee's announcement, the company will use the additional funding to extend its user base and to extend the feature set of the software. Hopefully, this additional funding will also mean that we can soon see hardware with pre-installed versions of Boxee.

quick intro to boxee from boxee on Vimeo

Among the sites indexed by VideoCrawler are the usual suspects like Hulu, blip.tv, MySpace Video, Google Video, and YouTube, though VideoCrawler also indexes presentations on SlideShare. We also noticed a large number of videos from newspaper and personal web sites. At the same time, however, our searches did not return any videos from sites like Revver, Vimeo, or Veoh.

More Than Just Video

One interesting feature of VideoCrawler is that it also allows you to restrict your searches to podcasts, Internet radio, TV shows, slideshows, and ringtones. This takes Videocrawler a step beyond most of its competitors and turns it into a more fully featured media search engine as opposed to just a video search engine, though, given its name, video search and aggregation seems to be the primary mission of VideoCrawler.

Overall, searching on Videocrawler worked quite well and it generally returned relevant results for our test searches.

Why AT&T is getting into this business is still not quite clear to us, but VideoCrawler is a worthwhile alternative to other video search engines, and will become even more so once it starts crawling a few more video sharing sites like Vimeo or Viddler.

With the new iPhone app, available in both a free version and a paid version which allows for more control over what you watch (OrbLive free just streams random files), you can now stream your media over 3G in addition to Wi-Fi and EDGE. Given Apple's approval of this application, they've set a precedent for approving apps that stream live video over 3G. They could now no longer block approval to apps like Slingbox, for example, as doing so would be illegal and anti-competitive. If they approved the OrbLive app knowingly, then we can expect a slew of 3G-enabled live TV and streaming media applications in the near future.

Of course, the new OrbLive app may have been admitted into the App Store by mistake, so before shelling out the $9.99 to purchase it, you may want to wait and see if the app is yanked in the next few days. We hope that's not the case, because live TV on the iPhone over 3G would be truly incredible. But this is Apple, so you never really know. 

In our earlier review, we pointed out that Meefedia's interface left much to be desired. The new version could still use some cosmetic updates, but it is already more usable than the first version. In March, we complained that there were very few logical connections between different parts of the site. Thanks to a stronger focus on channel browsing in this new version, this problem has now been remedied.

One feature we especially like on Mefeedia is the ability to import your subscriptions from YouTube, Vimeo, Blip, DailyMotion, and Hulu to your Mefeedia account. This way, you can indeed use Mefeedia as your one-stop shop for online video content.

Movie Channel

Mefeedia's new movie channel aggregates content from Hulu, Crackle, Archive.org, and others.  The selection of movies in this channel is obviously limited by the content on these other sites, and most of the full-length movies seem to come from Hulu. For now, there are very few interesting movies in this channel, but once the movie studios decide to license more full-length films for online streaming, this channel will surely become more exciting.

Competition

While YouTube is surely the first stop for many users, this does exclude a lot of good content on other sites like Vimeo or DailyMotion. In March, we already considered Mefeedia to be one of the best media search engines on the net. While Mefeedia's competitors like Blinkx or Truveo might offer more features, Mefeedia's focus on content and the ability to aggregate your subscriptions from other services still gives it an edge over those services.

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've remained proponents of live streaming video, claiming more than once that it is "going to be huge." If that's the case, why is Yahoo! pulling the plug on Y! Live so quickly?

One answer might be the competition. Yahoo! has seen little traction from its user base for the service during a period when services like UStream and Mogulus seem to be growing exponentially. Midway through Yahoo!'s Y! Live experiment, for example, UStream - one of the leaders in the space - boasted nearly 10 million unique viewers per month for its live video streams.

And then there's the slumbering giant that is the promise of YouTube's live streaming.

Long story short, Y! Live never really gained enough of a following to warrant the Brickhouse team continuing to spend development resources on it, according to today's announcement:

Our mission here on the Brickhouse team is to quickly develop product ideas that can add value to Yahoo! as a whole. To do this effectively we constantly evaluate our early-stage products and sometimes have to make the hard decision to move on, in order to continue exploring new territory and developing new products.

So where will the Brickhouse team be focusing their efforts now? It's a safe bet that current Brickhouse darling fire eagle - a service that helps users share their location information with others - will be garnering more attention, especially with the ever growing popularity of geo-aware devices and software entering the market, these days.

And there's always the chance that another Yahoo! experiment will get the green light. What might that be? We'll just have to stay tuned to Yahoo! Next* to see.

Live Streaming Goes Mainstream

The real news here is that mobile live streaming will now be available to a far wider audience than ever before. Qik is clearly positioning as a mass market product as well, while some of its competitors like Kyte have specifically shied away from going after this market and, so far, only support high-end Nokia S60 phones.

Now that Qik is becoming available to a larger and more diverse audience, it will be interesting to see if we will also see new ways of using it, as well as new controversies around the privacy and copyright implications of live streaming. Hopefully, Qik's competitors, including Kyte and Flixwagon will soon follow suit and release their software for mainstream phones as well.

If you are wondering about the video quality of these live streams, here is a demo from Qik:

There seems to be a trend among online video sites towards live streaming. Joost, which just debuted its web-based offerings, is also planning to add live streams to its service in the near future. The U.S. presidential election in particular seems to be a catalyst for live streaming. All the major U.S. networks will carry the debate live on their own web sites, and bothCurrent.tv and MySpace will provide live streams.

Hulu also announced its first premiere of a feature film, a documentary about Crawford, Texas, the site of President George W. Bush's ranch.

Idiomag is a company we love to tell people about - it's one of the most awesome ideas we've seen in a long time. The personalized music magazine site relaunched today with 4 times more content than ever before and a more traditional, link-intensive page design. Unfortunately, this great idea has serious problems in implementation and today's redesign doesn't appear to have solved those problems.

Idiomag looks at the color scheme of the video or photos accompanying an article and bases the whole page aesthetics on a complimentary set of colors. The service learns from your feedback and offers a new set of recommendations ever day.

We love the idea, but two years after Idiomag launched, we still return to the site begrudgingly today. We visit it at every opportunity, appreciating the music recommendations and hoping the rest of the site will get better.

Content is Hard

Why is it so unpleasant to go to Idiomag? Mostly because the syndicated text content from music blogs is awful. Most of it is really poorly written and the presentation is even worse. The Flash display of text from feeds misses punctuation, inserts spaces between letters in the middle of words - it's absolutely unreadable.

We keep hoping that the next article served up will be free of overdrawn adjective soup or abrupt beginnings and topic changes. No such luck.

There's obviously a world full of crappy music blogs out there, and we appreciate the MP3s they post, but Idiomag's parsing for quality content isn't working. The blog posts are placed very prominently on every page of the site and the whole user experience suffers as a result.

There are a lot of moving parts in the UI that make it unpleasant to use, as well. The first paragraph of every article is repeated as a "pull quote" at the top of the page, meaning you've got to skip the 2nd paragraph on every page because it's the same as the first. There's an independent collections of MP3s playing on all the pages, luckily they stop when a video loads, but they are no longer tied to the same artists as the articles and it appears that every article now has videos instead of photos.

We didn't see any of the celebrated new content from partners like Billboard and Rolling Stone. As part of the relaunch today, Idiomag says it has quadrupled the number of articles it can offer - up to 11,000 per month.

Give it a try for yourself, it's a great idea and maybe it will serve you better than it has us.

Big Name Users

Kyte's business model is to license its technology to larger companies, though Kyte is also looking at some revenue sharing deals. Some of the sites that currently feature Kyte's service include the Huffington Post, which used Kyte for its coverage of the Democratic and Republican National conventions, the Pussycat Dolls, who have offered behind the scenes footage thanks to Kyte, and the celebrity TV magazine Extra, which features three branded Kyte channels.

S60 Only

We asked Gannon about support for other mobile devices, but for now, Kyte is strictly focused on supporting Nokia S60 phones, which, according to Gannon, provide the best video streaming experience. Also, because Kyte is mostly trying to attract branded content, only supporting a limited range of hardware is not a real problem according to Gannon, as these larger companies will just buy a specific phone for this purpose, though this might slow down adoption by individual users.

With Kyte now being available on most S60 mobile phones, the mobile streaming market is quickly becoming even more competitive. Already, users can choose between Qik, Flixwagon, and other streaming video providers. Kyte's advantage over some of these other companies is that it provides a wider range of services and that it can stream from webcams and mobile devices. Kyte also allows you to upload videos from virtually any camera phone by emailing videos to a private email address.

This week, Fairtilizer has launched the first part of their new distribution platform: an embeddable player which allows indie artists to share their music anywhere on the net from web sites to blogs to social networks.

We told you about Fairitlizer over a year ago, when the company was still in private alpha. The easiest way to describe the site is to say that it combines the discovery aspects of Hype Machine with the distribution model of Tunecore. At the time of our initial writing, the company let artists upload tracks which visitors could browse through to find music they liked. Now Fairtilizer has opened its doors and is launching the next phase of their service: distribution.

Artists can now use one unified interface provided by Fairtilizer to distribute songs to blogs, web sites, social networks, and digital music stores...yes, even iTunes (The digital stores piece is coming soon, the others are available now). The distribution is aided by an embeddable player which can be added to any web site. The player comes in four different sizes and has shuffle and autoplay options as well as the ability to stream a customizable playlist. Once embedded, artists can then easily track analytics like downloads and plays per country.

The Fairtilzer Player:

Additionally, on the Fairtilizer web site itself, each track page comes with customizable URL, artwork, space for description and links (like to artist web sites, stores, and booking contacts, etc.), and a comment board for listeners. Tracks can be set to streaming only or made available for download, and soon artists will be able to mark them for sale, too, if they so desire. The tracks can also be set to public or private.

That private setting is designed to help artists in the initial phases before the launch of a new tune. Traditionally, launching a new track involves three steps: production, promotion, and distribution. With record companies today, leaks can occur in both the production and promotion phases as tracks are sent back and forth between artists, producers, DJs, journalists, and other taste makers who receive a first look before the track becomes publicly available. To combat those leaks, Fairtilizer provides these "private streams" instead. Artists will be able to send the track to specific people just as they did before, but the track will be protected from piracy and leaks.

The Future of Music

Although Fairtilizer will provide tools for artists wishing to sell their music, the focus isn't just on music sales. Instead, it focuses on providing all the tools an artist would need to get their music discovered, downloaded, shared, and distributed.

In the future, says Olivier Rosset, a former music exec and co-founder of Fairtilizer, it won't be about who owns the rights to a recording anymore. Music will instead center around the URL. And at Fairtilizer, they want to be the company that best helps an artist get that URL, that single track, onto the most sites across the internet.