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Ruckus Media Player Fails To Deliver Choice, Variety, Convenience
03/28/2008 The best technology is not only innovative, but it retains its usefulness. The media technology business has faced a grave problem in recent years: it is serving less and less of a function because the content that it serves to consumers is either free or more readily available through legal or illegal means elsewhere. When the business community deals with the onset of a commodity like that, the most successful companies are the ones that build a reputation with consumers. The idea behind the Ruckus Network is meant to appeal to desperate institutions that want a quick solution to the music piracy problem. Unfortunately, the developers behind the network sought simple solutions to the problems inherent in a distribution network like this one. The fact that the network is free to students does not offset the fact that in reality, Ruckus is a simply a media player for the sake of having a media player. It is, in the age of a thousand media alternatives, a waste of your time and is more useful for institutions looking to dodge the Recording Industry of America than it is for actual music listeners. Ruckus launched in 2004 on the back of venture capital and required a subscription for access to the site. In January 2006, the Network began to pay for itself using advertisements. Students with an .edu email account could get free access to the network starting in 2007. Previously, students could only access the network “for free” through contractual agreements between their university and Ruckus. According to the Ruckus official website, there are individual subscribers from over 1000 schools nationwide, and exclusive contracts with 203 schools. It also claims that a subscriber from an affiliated school would “experience additional benefits of exclusive content, faster download speeds and decreased bandwidth usage by having a local, on-campus media server on the schools’ network.” The University of Georgia is not listed as a school with an exclusive contract. I spent a few hours playing around with the Ruckus program and its companion website, which must be used in tandem with the program itself in order to download music. The program itself is not compatible with Macs, which was particularly confusing for me, as the target market for Ruckus is undoubtedly college-age users, but hopefully this will be rectified in the future. I found was nothing I couldn’t find better elsewhere. The interface is just numbingly stupid - you have to jump back and forth between your browser and the player to download music, even though there appears to be some form of browser as soon as you start the player. These problems are left, I assume, in the hopes that college students will go through hoops to get free music legally. Free and legal are generally good things in terms of music, and I love the fact that it is ad-supported. When the New York Times went ad-supported, I was ecstatic. I totally support this form of content distribution, and I support Ruckus continuing in this way. However, what is free isn’t always necessarily what you want... I could find about 60% of the searches that came up with results on iTunes. The appropriate word used when describing what you can find on Ruckus is "hodgepodge," or possibly "assortment." While they certainly have a great quantity of music, the quality of my selections was on par with what iTunes was offering about three to four years ago. It is a classic situation of a company telling you what you’ll need at their convenience, in a struggling industry that should make consumer choice its primary focus. Ruckus uses Microsoft’s PlaysForSure, a format designed to fight music piracy. Never mind that the program is incompatible with Apple products. This particular file format is incompatible with Microsoft’s own Zune! While it looks like there may be a few devices that DO use this format, including Creative Lab’s players, it wouldn’t work with more open players like SanDisk’s Sansa without quite a bit of finagling and time commitment. I suspect this was all in a move to retain what revenue the Ruckus Network has by affirming universities that the Network’s content has a scattershot of super-secure features. Ruckus serves as a media player for your computer to play their music, and no more. The website touts videos from “Ruckus TV” and games. The videos mostly consisted of sparse music videos, a surprising amount of web clips about motocross, and “indie films” which were comprised of bargain bin-ilk the likes of which Wal-Mart no longer sells (i.e., The Bela Lugosi Box: White Zombie). The games were flash games from elsewhere on the web and demo videos of games released about 6 months ago. These were perhaps best left off the site in favor of someone spending more time designing... well, everything else. And while the subject is at hand, here is a message to all future forays into the digital music distribution market: proprietary file types using DRM (Digital Rights Management) are dying and in the eyes of distributors of your products, are already dead. Amazon.com and Wal-Mart, two of the biggest retail outlets in the world, both made recent decisions against the proprietary format idea in late 2007. DRM is an argument made by producers of digital media in order to limit the use of digital media and devices, lest they lose control of content. Only recently have distributors woken up en masse to the possibility of revenue from abandoning proprietary DRM formats. As I said before, it isn’t about the music for a business like Ruckus, its about doing something with the music. Ruckus, Napster, and the like can’t figure this out. Music is becoming a commodity, and most internet users don’t see a difference between buying a record from a label or file sharing. All that matters is getting as much content as possible to customers with as little frustration as possible so that your firm can gain a reputation among consumers while this form of music distribution is still young. There is no way out of this situation for producers, or if there is, we haven’t figured it out yet or implemented such a plan successfully. Ruckus will survive for now as a way out for universities, but unless the network changes drastically, it will not expand out of the niche it occupies in the media market and will be outclassed by larger and more competitive networks looking to take this niche from Ruckus. Comments [post a comment]
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