HP Buys Melodeo, Gains NuTsie Music Service
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Does HP's acquisition of Melodeo and its music streaming application nuTsie, coming on the heels of its purchase of struggling smartphone maker Palm, suggest the company is making plans to challenge Apple in the smartphone space?
Hewlett-Packard, the world's largest technology company, confirmed the acquisition of music streaming company Melodeo, first reported
in the technology blog TechCrunch. The move follows HP's recent
acquisition of struggling smartphone maker Palm and suggests the
company is looking to go after Apple, which recently bought LaLa, a
competing music-streaming site. HP did not disclose the financial terms
of the deal, although an anonymous source quoted in TechCrunch put the
figure between $30 million and $35 million.
Based in Seattle, Melodeo offers an application called nuTsie that
allows users to stream songs from their iTunes collection onto various
smartphones, including Google Android-based phones, BlackBerry devices
and the iPhone. The 7-year-old company also offers iPhone games and
featured playlists by friends and Melodeo. However, if the company does
not have the rights to a certain track it cannot be played. Pricing
structure ranges depending on the carrier or platform; the Android app
costs users a one-time fee of $9.99, while Verizon offers the service
for $2.99 a month.
"HP confirms that it has acquired Melodeo, a privately held company
that provides cloud-based delivery systems for content across multiple
devices," the company said in a release. "HP's acquisition of Melodeo
is another example of our efforts to bring new, innovative technologies
to market. We are excited about the potential of this technology to
bring the power of cloud-based delivery services to millions of
customers."
The Melodeo team is partially comprised of members from Tegic
Communications, who developed the T9 text-entry software in addition to
the AOL and ICQ instant messaging software for mobile phones. The
Melodeo product client also contains open source components from HP,
such as permission to use, copy, modify, distribute and sell the
software and its documentation for any purpose without a fee. TechCruch
quoted a source putting Melodeo's site visits at 2 million unique
visitors per month with more than 2 millino downloads of its nuTsie
apps.
Apple-owned Lala,
which recently inked deals with Google and social networking behemoth
Facebook, offers a library of 8 million songs, which it allows its
users to stream once for free, and also sells unlimited streams for 10
cents per track and MP3 downloads starting at 79 cents. In comparison,
Spotify boasts a library of approximately 6 million tracks, while
iTunes offers 11 million tracks and sells individual MP3s for $1.29.
