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Apple Music comes to browsers today with a beta web player
Apple Music is making its debut in browsers today as Apple continues to untangle its media services from the confines of iTunes. If you're a subscriber, you can check out the public beta of the web player by signing in with your Apple ID.
Snapchat Stories come to the browser with Oscars roundup
Snapchat is immensely popular, but at the moment its plentiful Snaps and stitched Stories are trapped inside the mobile app. If you're on a laptop or PC, or want to share a Snap on another social network, there's no obvious way of doing so. That state of affairs started to change last night, however, when Snapchat slapped a live Story up on its website. It meant anyone could get a taste of what people were posting at the event, including, perhaps most importantly, people that aren't already on Snapchat.
Xbox Music web version launches today
As teased by Microsoft last week, you can now get your Xbox Music fix on a browser (and non-MS hardware) starting today. The service has now gone live over at music.xbox.com, offering up a music interface similar to its recent Windows 8 app refresh. It's also curiously able to play music across multiple devices at the same time -- something that streaming rival Spotify doesn't allow. The player itself adjusts to the size of your browser window, like this site, while your playlists can be edited and then synced with your Windows phone, Windows and Xbox 360. At the moment, the web version is for subscribers only. Not sure if it's the music service for you? Don't worry, Xbox Music has kept the 30-day trial it's offered since it first launched on Microsoft's game console. Sample it for yourself at the source link below. Steve Dent contributed to this report.
Spotify's web player exploited by Chrome extension to download songs as MP3s
This is why we can't have nice things. Spotify's web player has been rolling out to more users since its closed beta launch late last year, but today an extension popped up in the Google Chrome store (it's already been pulled) allowing users to download songs as MP3 files. According to the notes left by its author, the company wasn't using any encryption on its HTML5 player, making it a pretty simple project to put together. We're waiting to hear back from Spotify about the breach, and while Google appears to have been quick on the ball to remove the extension -- in a similar manner to how it's treated YouTube download tools in the Chrome Web Store -- hopefully this won't give others pause on distributing premium content using HTML5.
Joost lets P2P dreams die, settles on Flash player delivery
It was a valiant effort, it truly was, but even we saw this coming. Way back when, a couple of Skype founders had a brilliant idea of trying to pump out its own software that utilized peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing technology in order to distribute videos online and circumvent the so-called bandwidth limitations. Fast forward to now, and those plans are finally being axed. According to a notice from Joost, users will "no longer be able to watch videos in the Joost software application" after December 19th. Instead, those hoping to suck up some content from the company will be forced to watch the web video player, which has practically become the de facto standard over the past year. Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey even chimed in with this gem after hearing of the development: "[P2P] as a platform for legal consumer video is dead." Tough to disagree with the man, huh?
