If you’re looking for a quick and cheap way to expand your Blu-ray library, Sanity are offering 3 for $40 on selected titles. And while most of the titles are crap, there are a few nuggets of gold hidden away in there, like National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation and The Lost Boys. Go nuts! [Sanity – Thanks Mark!]
The rumours we heard back in May were true – Sanity has now officially launched its music subscription service, LoadIt, the same service it promised back when Microsoft launched Vista in January 2007. But anybody looking for the future o music consumption should look away fast, otherwise you might sear your eyeballs with the incredible lack of value in Sanity’s proposition.
For a start, it’s so packed full of restrictions that it makes Cuba look like the centre of the free world. First off, there’s the Windows Media association – we knew this was always going to happen, but it essentially means that Mac and Linux users are a no-go. And, of course, anyone who uses an iPod – each song is WMA with DRM, so only Plays For Sure MP3 players will work with this service.
Then there’s the track limits. For $29 a month you get – wait for it – the ability to download 300 songs each month. Over time, that’s probably not too bad a proposition – 3,600 songs each year isn’t terrible value for money. But that first month, when you want to load up your non-iPod MP3 player… You can only grab 300 songs. Worse is that if you do download more than 300, there are excess charges, although what they are isn’t spelled out on the LoadIt website. As a point of reference, Napster‘s subscription service in the US offers unlimited downloads for US$12.95 a month.
And finally, there’s the subscription model itself. You pay $29 a month for your music. After a year you might have built up a decent collection. But if you stop paying your subscription fees, all that music will disappear like smoke in the wind, and you’ll be left with nothing but a credit card debt and an empty MP3 player. More »
When Microsoft launched Vista in January last year, one of the most “exciting” aspects was the collaboration between Microsoft and Sanity to provide an online music service that would be integrated into Windows Media Player. It would offer both pay-per-track downloads, plus an all-you-can-eat subscription buffet that allowed you to transfer unlimted tracks to a WMA DRM-compatible MP3 player.
It never happened.
Until now. Apparently. Smarthouse is reporting that the service is currently being tested in Melbourne, and is set to go live between the end of May or early June.
