Mark Cuban post on preloaded iPods
December 7th, 2005Mark Cuban has a great post on how nice it would be to be able to fill up mp3 players with 30-100 GB of great content and listen to our hearts content.
Not only is there a problem with the "statutory mechanical royalty rate" per song that makes this prohibitively expensive, but one of my companies tried to pre-load other content (audio books for which it has rights) onto iPods last year only to find that when customers configured the iPod for their computer system they lost everything that had been pre-installed.
So there are licensing limitations and technical limitations.
Does anyone know if any mp3 player manufacturer has overcome the technical problems with pre-loading content?
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Posted in: Business Models Gadget Watch
December 7th, 2005 at 15:56 PM
It sounds like your problem preloading an iPod is be a software problem which therefore would only apply to iPods?
December 7th, 2005 at 16:43 PM
I preload alot of music for my customers. (From their own cd collections.) In order to do it, you must turn off the auto-sync capability on the iPod. That way, when you plug it into their computer it won't auotmatically sycn with their computer. Rather, it will keep all the music on the iPod and you can drag and drop anything else you want onto the iPod. (in iTunes)
This is not a hack, you just mount the iPod in iTunes and under in the preferences you can turn off the auto sync.
December 7th, 2005 at 16:58 PM
Going along with what Brian said, I am pretty sure you could get an order of iPods direct which has the auto sync off by default. I have seen devices of all kinds that have different defaults depending on the distributor.
December 7th, 2005 at 17:04 PM
Herbalife International is giving away thousands of iPods to their qualifying distributors this year. They are pre-loaded with content, including videos (so, we knew last year iPod video was coming out) and they seem to have it worked out not to overwrite the pre-loaded content. HLF's CIO is Aldo Moreno
December 7th, 2005 at 17:07 PM
Re: my last comment, see BusinessWeek's take on what Herbalife, GM and others are doing with podcasting, along with a cool look at tech tools for CEOs: http://images.businessweek.com/ss/05/07/ceoguide/index_01.htm
December 7th, 2005 at 21:58 PM
I think the problem isn't the player. I have heard that it's an iTunes problem.
You might try the ZVUE. www.zvue.com
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