I was at a friend’s house the other weekend, who’d suggested we all pile back to his at the end of the night. In the near past (i.e. last year!) this would have involved a dubious CD of his choice and maybe a DVD or video game (depending on our energy levels and co-ordination – in other words, how drunk we were all feeling!)

This time, though, it involved music selected by all of us from Spotify, which never fails to deliver, followed by an hour two spent trawling through the archives of YouTube, which was hooked up to his impressive Samsung HDTV.

Viewing YouTube on an HDTV makes so much more sense than viewing it through a PC. Just seeing it on your telly makes for a much more sociable (not to mention comfortable) experience. It seems so less geeky, and therefore just as valid a piece of evening entertainment as a DVD.

In fact, it was so easy to dip into, it felt natural to everyone watching it – well, as natural as watching Stavros Flatley can be!!

What was intriguing, though, was how everyone came alive once the 3 minute clip had ended. ‘Is Susan Boyle on there?’ asked one deluded friend. She was.

‘I saw a clip on a riduclous wedding’ shouted another as soon as SuBo had finished warbling. A quick search later and up it came, followed in quick order by other ‘amusing’ wedding clips, various clips of car crashes, and the chinese guy who pushed a suicidal man off a bridge because he was holding up rush hour traffic (he survived).

All of this, of course, is familiar to regular YouTubers. What was unfamiliar to us all, though, was the context – someone’s lounge after the pub.

It was immediately familiar, yet much more fun than watching static video or TV. People were sharing their own favourite clips, which we all laughed at or mocked. Each clip was short enough to ensure no-one got bored. And none of it, not a single second, involved terrestrial or satellite TV. If I was a traditional broadcaster, I’d be seriously worried!

What this made me realize (apart from how differently my brain works when drunk if this is what I was thinking about!) is how much the Web is changing the way we entertain ourselves.

YouTube’s been around for three years, now, and HDTV much longer. Mix the two together, though, and you have a brilliant new way of entertaining you and your friends after a merry evening of drunkenness that really is non-geeky!

What I think is missing, though, and where there must be a huge opportunity, is a Spotify for music. The ability to create a playlist of favourite clips that everyone can contribute to, so that you get home and watch what is, effectively, your group’s own personalized TV channel, all selected by members of the group.

This is a huge opportunity for someone. Individual clips are fine, but having a pre-selected channel of group-selected content, chosen before an event before people get too drunk to think, is what the market’s crying out for.

I’m sure something like this must already exist, but if it does, it isn’t exactly heavily promoted. I’ll do some digging and see what I can find.

In the meantime, if you know of a service or Web app that acts like Spotify for video, feel free to add it in the comments below.

Instead, you play a flat rate subscription that gives you unlimited downloads for a year, after which you get to keep the tracks you’ve downloaded, but not download any new tracks unless you take out another subscription.

Seems like a reasonably deal. Unfortunately, as with all things digital music, there’s catch – the tunes you download contain DRM that locks them into the mobile phone or PC you register with the service. In other words, you can keep your tunes for as long as you like, but you can’t transfer them to other devices.

Until now…!

Yes, after just a few months of the service going live, a new application has emerged called TuneBite that extracts all of the DRM from any tunes you’ve downloaded from Nokia’s stores. It works in a similar way to ye olde tape recording of the last century, in which you used something called cassette tapes to record the tunes you or your friends had on vinyl.

TuneBite plays the tune silently in the background (at speeds up to 54x the original) on your PC and re-records the resultant signal to any format you need – without DRM.

So, combining TuneBite with Nokia’s Comes With Music lets you download any tune you want – legally – for a year, and the you can use TuneBite to strip it of its DRM – legally! You’re then free to keep the resultant track forever, and transfer it to any other device you want to listen to it on – legally!

Very nice. The only thing you can’t do, of course, is upload it to a file sharing app, but that goes without saying.

The sooner DRM dies the better, and TuneBite is just one more nail in its coffin!

[Source: TechDigest]

Now I’m usually skeptical about such things, but Spotify is different – it’s bloody brilliant!

There are four key things that make Spotify unique, and which seem to have got the blogosphere so excited.

1. Speed and ease of use

OK, so that’s probably two things, but no matter. One of the best things about Spotify is its speed. You download a tiny client onto your machine, and within seconds you’re listening to the tunes you want to listen to, and in glorious 160kb-encoded Ogg Vorbis sound, too, which although not quite CD quality, it’s equivalent to DAB radio.

It really is ludicrously fast. Although you stream the music from Spotify’s server, there’s no delay whatsoever. Simply type in the name of the artist you want to listen to, click on a track, and bingo, you’re listening to it! Even the search is lightning fast.

It might be different once the service takes off, but at the moment, there’s no delay whatsoever. It’s actually quicker to listen to tunes on Spotify than it is to insert a CD and listen to it on your CD player.

2. Number of tunes

I’ve no idea how many tunes Spotify has, but it’s collection is vast. My tastes are, er, somewhat eclectic, yet it still pulls up tracks from the artists you want. I even typed in “Tiefschwartz”, which an incorrect spelling, and it responded instantly saying “did you mean “Tiefschwarz?” I clicked on yes, and instantly up popped dozens of Tiefschwarz tunes.

Never heard of Tiefscwarz? That’s my point! Obscure niche artists aren’t left out.

Neither are the big names, either. Lily Allen, Sugababes, Girls Aloud, even Radiohead and the Beatles, all are contained within Spotify’s gigantic database. Which leads me onto the third great thing of Spotify…

3. Support from the major record labels

Spotify is legit. Yes, it’s true, this vast record library is available because nearly all of the major record labels are on board. EMI, Universal, Sony BMG and Warner are all on board, giving Spotify access to a huge range of tunes. How does Spotify do this? Simple. It’s business model is what the majors should have looked into delivering years ago, rather than suing the arse off its customers.

Spotify, you’ll recall, is a music streaming service rather than a music download service. The tunes are streamed to your machine, so they don’t actually exist as a file that you can then share to your mates. This makes the record labels very happy.

There are three options you can choose to listen to your tunes.

• Free ad-supported subscription – ads are inserted every now and then between your tracks, but they’re not intrusive at all
• Per-day rate – pay 99p and you get 24 hour access with no ads
• Monthly subscription –
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