MobHappy

Ericsson and Napster said today they’ll create a mobile music service to sell to mobile operators. The white-label system will offer PC-based and over-the-air downloads, as well as support multiple flavors of DRM, not just the Microsoft technology employed by Napster’s PC service, so as to accommodate OMA DRM. The system will support both subscription [...]

At the same event as the previous post, somebody from Motorola was pooh-poohing multimedia streaming and downloads over mobile networks (again) in an attempt to talk up the company’s iRadio product. Derek Kerton over at Techdirt caught a demo of iRadio, with a Linux-based smartphone connecting to a car stereo. As Motorola is so keen [...]

XM Satellite Radio’s CEO says the company is in active discussions with mobile operators about offering some type of its service over mobile networks. The clear implication would be that since XM is talking to operators — not handset manufacturers — it’s mulling over some version of its online streaming service as opposed to building [...]

The WSJ is reporting that Yahoo will unveil its own subscription-based music service (similar to Napster to Go or RealNetworks’ Rhapsody) on Wednesday, and it’s priced to move: $7 a month or $60 a year for access to a million tracks — that annual rate is a third of Real’s cost. Yahoo says its service [...]

Om Malik reports that Mercora, which lets users play DJ and set up their own streaming channels, is now offering a mobile application that lets Windows Mobile users listen to channels on their devices. Services like Mercora illustrate the massive shift underway to personal mobile media — a movement that’s rendering time or location irrelevant [...]

I take back everything I ever said about Om Malik (just kidding, Om ): his latest piece for Business 2.0 on online radio, more specifically how it’s dead in the water, is wide of the mark in my estimation. I agree with a lot of Om’s assertions about the viability of streaming radio over wired [...]

Om Malik comes through again with some details on RealNetworks’ big announcement scheduled for Tuesday: the company will announce Real Rhapsody To Go, a portable extension of its existing subscription service. The big scoop is that Rhapsody To Go will support the Microsoft Play4Sure DRM for use on portable devices, and for $15 a month [...]