If Best Buy walks, Real's Rhapsody will hurt

[Conchchowder]

Will we get a firmware update from Insignia to get us to go to Napster?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10046617-93.html

[CrowdAds]

[Tobey]

There's no reason to. Rhapsody will work whether Best Buy quits bundling it with their players or not.

[Conchchowder]

Originally Posted by Tobey

There's no reason to. Rhapsody will work whether Best Buy quits bundling it with their players or not.

I may beg to differ.

Jim_from_QA wrote:

justlevine wrote:
Fair enough.
However, is 4.311 the current build? some users are referencing a more recent version (http://real.lithium.com/real/board/m...hread.id=32313).

Yes and no.

We partner with a number of companies to produce variants of Rhapsody which may have small (or sometimes significant) customizations for those partners. For most of these variants (dubbed "cobrands", 4.0.4.311 is the latest.

We have done a special version for users migrated to Rhapsody from the Yahoo! Music Jukebox, and one for Verizon's V CAST music initiative, both of which have later version numbers (4.0.4.414 and 4.0.4.438, respectively).

These should have changes in them which only affect the needs of those cobrand partners (such as a different splash image for the V CAST cobrand). In particular, we aren't putting bug fixes into these releases and withholding them from other users, so there's no need to try and scramble up a version of that alternate cobrand release; if there's something that will have a notable effect for all our users, we'll release for all cobrands so that everyone can get the goodies.

(Don't read too much into the number leaps, either. We bump the numbers up to the next level to differentiate the releases; there weren't 125 interim builds between 311 and 438!)

Since our player is a co-brand, I can assume that updates to our player will cease after the ties are severed...who knows, maybe even some animosity to ignore the player...who knows.

We may still fall under PFS, as other PFS players, but ours is optimized for Rhapsondy as other PFS players are not.

We are all but abandoned by the manufacturer of our product as firmware updates are concerned and Real has said they aren't concerned about a minority of users who are suggesting new enhancements and nave even outright stated that they aren't interested.

[Tobey]

All this means is Best Buy is going to stop bundling their rebadged version of Rhapsody with their players and start pushing Napster on people. This will have absolutely no effect on Insignia player owners. Rhapsody will continue to work with your player as usual.

Nothing will change.

[covertrussian]

Actually if they switch to Napster, that will probably push them to release a firmware update to support Napster on the Pilot

[Tobey]

They won't need to, it already does. Napster uses the same Janus DRM that Rhapsody and many other services do.