LimeWire Ghost Town After Shut Down, Still Clings to Future Plans
LimeWire has let go of 29 of their 100-person workforce in the wake of a federal injunction against their operations. However, in spite of this, the peer-to-peer software outfit keeps intimating that they’re continuing work on a music-related project. Peter Kafka from All Things D waxes thoughtful on the subject in his article,
I don’t know whether LimeWire’s new service, which the company has been referring to internally as “Grapevine”, will also be based on peer-to-peer technology or not; I should have more on that later. But I do know that the service won’t have any hope of working unless it can get the big music labels to sign on.
That’s theoretically possible, because LimeWire and owner Mark Gorton have talked with the labels about that sort of thing before. But they’ve talked for a very long time, and have never reached a pact in the past.
In my mind peer-to-peer protocols could be used to enhance speed and buffering of streaming music delivery. Since P2P technology gets faster and better when people near each other are streaming the same source, multiple people in the same office listening to the same radio stream could lessen the load on the primary stream source by streaming their buffers to nearby neighbors. Sounds like a grapevine to me!
Ah, but this is just blatant speculation on my part.
With services like Pandora switching to pay services (free for 40 hours a month, then you have to pay) and Amazon.com and iTunes, music labels might do well dipping into the Internet radio scene. Possibly because streaming radio, just like terrestrial radio, is an excellent way for them to hawk their wares to the public; distinctively streaming radio is a common comfort for people at work.
While the recording industry as seen fit to stomp on peer-to-peer technologies like LimeWire, Napster, and the like, they might be more amenable to technologies that they can see how to more readily monetize and control. As a result of the injunction, LimeWire may just be trying their best to sell-out to the industry in hopes of reducing the fiscal punishment that will come out of this latest judgment.
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