SeeqPod goes mobile
CTIA’s Fall Wireless and I.T. & Entertainment Expo last month brought together companies from all over the wireless space including developers, content owners, systems integrators and solutions providers. And even though the show felt much smaller than past shows we have a attended, it still managed to attract a crowd of some of the most innovative and cutting edge technologies in the wireless market today.
One such innovative and cutting edge technology comes from SeeqPod. Full disclosure: I was a huge SeeqPod fan to begin with. But nothing seals the deal more than meeting with their awesome team on person and getting more familiar with the service and its features.
Here’s a video we did with Seeqpod:
Mobility PR interviews Seeqpod from Mobility Public Relations on Vimeo.
What is it?
SeeqPod is a playable search engine designed specifically for crawling the web to find audio, video, and podcasts. Described as the search engine for music, SeeqPod has a reported index of over 8 million songs which are all available on-demand. It’s instant gratification for the music lover- and we can’t get enough of it here at the MoPR HQ.
How does it work?
Simply type in the song you want to listen to, SeeqPod scours the web for it, and voila-you’ve got your music, on-demand. Create playlists, too, in order to really customize your SeeqPod page. And of course not every song ever created has made it to the site yet, but I challenge you to search your current favorite tune and NOT find it in the index.
What makes it so compelling to us?
So what’s better than SeeqPod on your computer? SeeqPod mobile which was released during CTIA.
Steve Doss, SeeqPod’s VP of Mobile and Consumer Electronics, said that the “new Mobile Discovery solution allows for multiple integration options, including the customized cataloguing of music, text and other media…When it comes to music in particular, SeeqPod technology can help your customers discover new songs or rediscover forgotten favorites.”
The uh-oh factor
So now you’ve got your SeeqPod with you anywhere. Everything seems to be going perfectly- except for that one nasty little issue of a lawsuit currently in the works with the Warner Music Group who is suing the company for profiting on copyrighted works.
Warner claims that it’s an “unlawful music service that directly engages in, encourages, and facilitates the mass infringement of Plaintiffs’ and other intellectual property owners’ copyrighted works.”
Different from music sites like Pandora and Last.fm who have to advertise on their sites in order to afford their signed licensing deals with copyright owners, SeeqPod is currently protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and its “Safe Harbor” clause which allows SeeqPod to continue streaming the music as long as it isn’t hosted on their server. For the record, it sounds like what SeeqPod is doing is completely legal. And until someone tells them otherwise, they don’t intend on stopping. We certainly hope they don’t!
So what does this all mean for the future of music search engines? No one really knows for sure. For now, SeeqPod is safe (yippee!) while others like Pandora struggle to gain advertising to pay the high price of royalties. And since record labels aren’t giving up easily, this battle could wage on for a while.
What do you think? Should companies like SeeqPod have to pay royalties or are the record labels being too greedy? Let us know your thoughts.
