www.play-box.com Playbox (US) Inc., a development stage company, owns an online music hosting and downloading application, which targets unsigned music acts and small- to medium-sized record labels enabling them to establish their own music downloading or hosting services. The application is offered with a range of supplemental services, such as hosting, streaming, e-commerce, and digital rights management (DRM) using the latest MP3 and Windows Multimedia technology. Interfaces The company’s PlayBOX online music application includes four dynamic interfaces, namely White Label, Aggregator, Bespoke, and Jukebox, which provide an interface between artists and content owners and their listeners through the Internet. White Label Interface: The White Label interface provides artists a way to offer their music for sale to listeners through the Internet by enabling them to download individual songs either directly from the company’s Website or from the artist’s own Website. Aggregator Interface: The PlayBOX Aggregator interface allows clients to create and manage an interactive online download store for music catalogues of between 50 and 1,000 songs, with e-commerce, tracking, reporting, and billing functions. PlayBOX also offers management services for this interface. Bespoke Interfaces: The company hires independent Website developers and designers on a project-by-project basis who could create an interface to handle various specialized client requests. Music Jukebox Interface: The PlayBOX Music Jukebox interface is a free service, which allows users to both listen to music and manage their personal computer music collections online in an image-driven environment. The PlayBOX Music Jukebox also lets users transfer their music to and from portable devices, which could play MP3 or other similar music files. Services The company offers various services that work with its interfaces. Clients could send the company their content on compact disk in a raw format (such as WAV), which is then processed into Windows Media files, which are smaller and downloaded by users from the Internet. These files are then stored on its server and supplied to consumers. Hosting and bandwidth: The music files, which artists wish to sell to users of PlayBOX are stored or ‘hosted’ on the company’s server, which it leases from Open Hosting Ltd., a server service. A single song usually requires approximately 7MB of storage space. The company’s server provides ‘bandwidth’, which enables users to download files over the Internet. PlayBOX runs a Linux server, having 1,000 GB of bandwidth per month, out of Open Hosting’s facility in London. Ripping and Encoding: PlayBOX could encode audio for use on the company’s Website from various source material, including compact discs and WAV format into MP3, Windows Media files, or Advanced Audio Coding (AAC or MP4) file formats. Digital Rights Management: Digital rights management (DRM) is a system for protecting the copyrights of data (including music) circulated through the Internet or other digital media by enabling secure distribution and disabling illegal distribution of the data. PlayBOX uses Microsoft Windows Media DRM, a platform to protect and securely deliver content for playback on a computer, portable music device, or network device. eCommerce: PlayBOX utilizes Barclaycard’s Merchant Services’ proprietary ‘ePDQ System’ to process its secure online payments. Once a PlayBOX user has chosen one or more songs or products from the company’s Website that they wish to purchase, they are directed to the Barclaycard’s ‘ePDQ’ Cardholder Payment Interface (CPI), a payment environment, where the user would pay for their purchases either by debit card or credit card. Tracking and Billing: Tracking and Billing allows PlayBOX clients to gain an understanding of their fan base. Each PlayBOX user’s movements through the different PlayBOX interfaces is logged, and this information, along with other data, including their collective purchases and where they are logging in from, is made available to the company’s clients in real time. Disposition In July 2008, the company disposed Playbox Media Limited, its wholly owned subsidiary in the U.K. Competition The company identifies competition from RealNetworks; Apple Inc.; Microsoft; Sony Online Entertainment; Napster; OD2/Loudeye; 7 Digital Ltd.; MPP Global Ltd.; and DA Recordings Ltd. History Playbox (US) Inc. was founded in 2003.
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