Placeshifting To Your Mobile

In a bid to encourage music fans to listen to music on their mobile phones, a number of companies have begun to push ‘placeshifting‘ as an alternative to the simple ‘browse-and-buy’ model.

Placeshifting allows subscribers to play music located on their home computer through their mobile – the audio is streamed to the phone via an Internet connection (the service only works for web-enabled handsets). With the new NuTsie service from Melodeo, the user’s computer does not have to be on for the service to work – when signing up, users can export their iTunes song library details to the NuTsie server, which is then matched with items on Melodeo’s own music database.

Once your account is active, Melodeo streams songs randomly to your phone. As this is essentially a Web streaming service, there are legal limitations on how many times a particular artist can be played within a specified timeframe. This means that you can’t listen to entire albums – however, the overall number of songs available is limited only by your computer’s hard drive, rather than the lower storage capacity of a mobile phone.

A further advantage (from a monetisation viewpoint) of using people’s existing music collections to determine a streaming broadcast is expressed by Dave Dederer of Melodeo:

“If your iTunes library is full of music you copied from friends or you illegally downloaded and nobody got paid for it, this is going to monetize it, (Artists) get paid for it every time you listen to it.”