MTV URGE Will Go To Market As Beta

[By Staci D. Kramer] A little teaser from a long interview at CTIA with Van Toffler, president, MTV Networks Group President and Jason Hirschhorn, chief digital officer that will post later today. MTV announced its long-awaited music service Urge last December and its integration with the upcoming Windows Media Player 11 was highlighted by Microsoft Chaiman Bill Gates at CES. Now the companies are getting ready for an early second-half launch. As usual, most of the details are being held close so this just scratches the surface. We didn’t get into this but I’m not sure the MTV execs are prepared for the kind of criticism that can come their way if people react negatively to the new version of WMP; the first release will be a bridge of sorts between Windows XP and Vista, now postponed for consumer release until Januray.
Let’s do a little status report on Urge. Hirschhorn: We’re in sort off alpha-edge beta testing right now. We’re very happy with it. What you’ll see go out into the marketplace is beta. … Clearly, community is on the roadmap. … This is unique in two ways: One, we are the first content company ever to put out a music service; 2, we worked with Microsoft in a fashion that they are not accustomed to working in and it is a Microsoft that I did not recognize. It is one that is open to suggestion, open to partnership and we influenced — when you see the Windows 11 media player, MTV Networks very much influenced that — and this was not an SDK deal. This wasn’t ‘you plug your service into our player'; the service and the player were developed together in Redmond. We shipped 15 people out there to build it together.
The space is getting extremely crowded for music services; everyone wants to say they have one รข

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