Zukunftsperspektiven des mp3-Standards

[Johannes Ulbricht <Johannes_Ulbricht@csi.com>]

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Don't Care What People Say - MP3 Is Here to Stay
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Mark Cuban, the president of Broadcast.Com recently chaffed at the South
By Southwest conference in Texas that MP3 is dead.  Cuban offers that
MP3 has no money behind it and that since Real Player and Microsoft's
NetShow DO have money behind them, MP3 is going to bite the dust. 

The longer I have DSL, the more convinced I am that Broadcast.Com has a
great business model, but that said I think Mr. Cuban is a little
off-base on this one.  I'm all for the MP3 format (or whatever may
replace it) to fade so far into oblivion that it becomes like ASCII and
nobody gives it a second thought.  I don't care how it works, as long as
it works.  But today, I already have a way to slap an audio CD into my
CD-ROM drive and convert the songs to the MP3 format and play them
digitally on my computer or transfer them to Diamond's RIO player.  

So far, MP3 format and the software available for it gives the end users
ultimate power to customize their digital music experience in a variety
of ways.

I'd grant that there may not yet any good backend tools to stream the
MP3 format and there are with Microsoft's Net Show and Real Network's
Real Player (though I have found nothing that streams that sounds as
good as MP3 yet -- that isn't to say that there isn't some very
high-quality streaming available, but there sure isn't much yet).
Besides, I already have 1,000 songs on my hard drive, so I'm not much
worried about streaming stereo radio broadcasts and I'm one of the few
folks (relatively speaking) who would have the bandwidth to support
playing back such streams.

If Real Networks or Microsoft make a better free MP3 player -- fine.  If
they give you the tools to make your own MP3's that are as easy as say
what MusicMatch has to offer  < http://www.musicmatch.com >, that's fine
too.  And if something comes along that offers all the flexibility and
customization of MP3 and it's better, that's fine too.  But I don't see
that happening.  For one, Microsoft even though it was very quick
(relatively speaking) to add MP3 playback to its media player, seems to
be playing nice-nice with the record companies who want some type of
encryption on MP3 files so they aren't quite as portable.  That isn't
going to work.  Name me one encryption technology that was created for
the benefit of the "publishers" without benefiting the end user that has
succeeded!  Still thinking?  MP3 is here now, and aside from streaming,
it definitely seems the way to go.