Karaoke Forums

My good friend Harry Brelsford runs a few business ventures. He best known as the founder of SMB Nation - one of the best known organizations focused on small to medium business in the technology space.

Yesterday, he published an article that reinforces something I posted to KS almost 2 years ago - Cloud based subscription services are the way the industry is moving and is one of the only ways that some forms of piracy can be eliminated.

http://www.smbnation.com/content/news/e ... generation

As it pertains to karaoke piracy, I don't think this applies 100% because there will always be ways to capture the audio/video stream and store it locally. But I do believe that once more streaming services come online and competition forces prices down to reasonable levels, there will be fewer people pirating because it becomes 1) easy to obtain and 2) low cost.

_________________
-Chris

Give me reliable gigabit wifi, and I'll pay for a streaming service all day long!

Have you ever heard that stat that countries like Iran, Qatar, Latvia, Bulgaria, and Iceland have faster, more reliable Internet than the US? It's also ridiculously faster, and treated like a public utility, in most Scandinavian countries.

That's what you get when the major US Internet providers are basically exempt from antitrust regulation, have pretty much no competition, and hold back technology.

_________________
C Mc
KJ, FL

And as a public (aka GOVERMENT) utility, you are bound by the regulations (aka wims) of the Public (aka goverment)

Where is my foil hat???


I work for the 5th largest cable MSO in the US, and we have had 100Mb+ internet service for over 2 years now, and they are opening it up to 160Mb.

Really don't see why you need a gigabit connection to stream a video.

I would assume that you qould buffer the video to ram first before playing from a cloud service?


And cloud is bad, untill all places have a good quality, reasonably priced internet connection.

Just last week the wifi router died at the bar I gig at, so no connection. What would a cloud KJ do then?

Of the two KJ's that I know, both ate supplying their own hotspots. I supply my own but don't use it for streaming.

_________________
The Line Array Experiment is over. Nothing to see here. Move along.

I have a T-Mobile puck. I don't use it much, but if the bar's WiFi went down, I would have a back up. Not quite as fast, but it would work.

_________________
I am the ONLY SANE 1 HERE

my phone is set for hot-spotting. have had the bars go wonky a few times and just switched mine on. still bought songs, still got Songbookdb requests with no interruption

_________________
Paradigm Karaoke, The New Standard.......Shift Happens

If a generation is 25 years then piracy will still be a problem at least for awhile. How many KJ's have signed up for Cloud currently? Do they even have a 1,000 subscribers? How reliable is it? Cloud was supposed to be the last best hope for the industry, that was way back during the summits, remember them? I still think there could be pirates even after 25 years with all the disc material that has been transferred to HD's. With the drop in production of new karaoke tracks for various reasons, a pirate host could run a show with just old discontinued material for at least the next 15 to 20 years.

Because the goal is to stream with as little compression as possible. Notice that nobody streams videos in full HD AND Full Surround Sound. I love Hulu but I can tell the difference between their compressed stream and a BluRay or even other downloaded uncompressed content.

I want my plasma TV to have to work.....

_________________
-Chris

Really? what cable company is that? I can barely get 50Mb and am paying out the AZZZ for it. Tell my so I can jump if it's available in my area....OH please don't say Comcast

_________________
I like everyone when I first meet them. If you don't like me that's not my problem it's YOURS!
A stranger is a friend you haven't met yet

then there is the whole mutiple devices sharing one connection thing.

Most cable providers take the full bandwidth available and split it between a set amount of customers, so during peak periods you could have as much as 8 people using essentially the same internet connection

I pay $72.00 a month for 30 down/10 up Internet in one of the top 20 markets in the country (Tampa Bay). I speed test it all of the time, and it is almost always closer to 20/2. That SUCKS!

_________________
C Mc
KJ, FL

I live 12 miles (drive miles) from the Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA. My house is in Redmond, WA. All I can get is 10meg down and 768k up (DSL) and I am on a business plan because I have static IP addresses. Cable is a max of 15 down and 1 meg up. But since they don't even offer business plans for residential areas, I can't run my servers.

If I want more, I have to move (next summer).

_________________
-Chris

Full hd karaoke?

Yes, but what I am really talking about is TV and Movie content.

_________________
-Chris

Time Warner here offers 100 but it's a bit pricey..

ANYWAY......

The point of this thread was to point out that software companies are figuring out that always on Internet connectivity allows them to control their software much better than before. Office365 provides advanced document creation, editing, and storage via a web browser connected to the cloud. There are a bunch of games that now require you to have an always on Internet connection as well.

I have always said that KaraokeCloud type services are the future of content delivery and I believe that still. But as I noted above, audio and video content can be captured and then taken offline. The only way karaoke companies will pull it off is to make it cheap enough and easy enough to consume that people don't have a reason to steal it.

They will also have to do some value add type things like adding a Singer Showcase type feature, Community Forums, and other goodies - each with their own fee. basically leverage the infrastructure they use for the music delivery for other items they can charge for.

There is a lot that can still be done with karaoke that is super cool.

_________________
-Chris