Urge Microsoft and MTV
URGE: Microsoft and MTV
I'm actually going to bring Bill and introduce Van Toffler, the president of MTV Networks, the music group, to come back on stage and talk a little bit more about some of the things we're doing within music. (Applause.) Bill, Vance.
VAN TOFFLER: Hi.
So thank you. I'm Van Toffler, and it's a privilege to represent MTV Networks here tonight to announce our new venture, URGE, alongside with Microsoft and Bill Gates. Though I have to tell you I'm personally really excited to give Mr. Gates in person backstage the massive $50 royalty check for being the inspiration for our MTV film "Napoleon Dynamite." (Laughter, applause.) Separated at birth. (Laughter.)
Bill, was that a bad career move to put that photo up? You don't need to answer that, it's too late.
Anyway, I thought I'd kick it old school by bringing some handwritten notes here. Microsoft and Bill Gates are synonymous with innovation and technological breakthroughs, and MTV Networks has been at the forefront of innovation around music and content catered for young adults for 20 plus years.
We were the first to put music on a new platform in the early '80s when we introduced the notion of music television, and you can all personally thank me later for introducing to the world both Milli Vanilli and Vanilla Ice, though I think it was a year apart, so please cut me a break.
And today the pairing of MTV Networks and Microsoft takes us down another path of innovation, the digital expansion and migration of the musical experience. The seeds of many of our cultural revolutions have been born in the world of music, and the digital revolution has proven to be no different. Today, with URGE we're bringing to market a unique approach to digital music, one focused on the emotional connection to music. URGE will offer a customized relationship with music, a sense of musical discovery, along with access to millions of songs from major labs and indies, an opportunity to listen to over a hundred radio stations, a chance to learn about the roots of songs and lyrics, plus interaction with hundreds of artists and access to their playlists of must-haves.
You can also take URGE and make it your own and personalize your own soundtrack and make it for any mood or event.
With URGE we're undertaking a long journey with music fans, and this is just the beginning. Like our TV brand, URGE will be continually reinvented. It will be programmed for music fans by music fans. Subscribers will customize and drive this service, they will tell us what sucks and what they hate about the service, they will customize it, program it, share it, change it and move with it.
In addition, taking advantage of our 25 year plus of experience and relationships with artists, labels and music fanatics, we will engage an army of music professionals, bloggers, musicians, creative gray album producing musical freaks, and experts in all genres of music who will help guide the consumer experience as well, which is definitely unique to URGE.
So please taken note we are trying something new with URGE, like music television was 25 years ago, and that's certainly needed some reinvention along the way. Can you say, "Flock of Seagulls video 30 times a day?" Thank God, times have changed. Yet, today with URGE it is our mission to create a truly immersive, emotional, engaging and entertaining experience around music, which will only get better with time.
So we believe today marks a great day for music, for labels, for artists and also marks the continuation of a wonderful collaboration between Microsoft and MTV Networks.
So maybe, Aaron, we can take a look at URGE?
AARON WOODMAN: Absolutely. We're super excited to be the ones to have the opportunity to give you guys a sneak preview of what the URGE music service is going to look like.
Right below my local library is the URGE music service, and it's really kind of that deep integration into the player, working alongside with MTV and the player team to build a great experience.
The first thing you should know is URGE is going to deliver music across genres. They're going to actually deliver hundreds of hand built playlists, over a hundred CD quality radio stations, and the top music you expect. They're going to do that in an environment that is creative and has great design.
When URGE music service launches, they're going to have over two million tracks available for individual song or album purchase or as part of an all you can eat subscription.
And because it's built exclusively in the Windows Media Player, it's going to have those same great tools that you have on your local library now against this 2 million track library. In fact, when I open up the music service it looks a lot like the above library.
I can search by album or artist. Artist is a pretty good way to start. I've been listening to Green Day, I've been talking to Bill a little bit about it backstage. So if I wanted to find Green Day, instantly the results are brought to me, two million songs to the few that are interesting to me.
I could quickly and easily open up my My Playlist, and I could drag these 15 albums over to make an instant playlist and start listening. That's the type of program you can expect from the MTV relationship.
Besides the albums, they're going to really leverage the strong voices that are behind and are in MTV to provide you really great content. In this case, if I go to rock informer, you get some of the strongest voices in the music industry delivering editorial blogging and editorial context and text. In this case I don't only just get the text, I actually get the songs themselves so it's a great integration between the content you're interested in and the music you can listen to, all in a single place.
They're going to actually do that same type of integration with some of their channels. In fact, the MTV channel hub shows a wonderful integration, showcasing new and upcoming artists, superstars, content from some of their channel programming like TRL, VMA, some of their MTV Unplugged, and they're going to build those same type of channel hubs for both VH1 and CMT.
Lastly, why don't we do one more artist search? What's an artist you've been listening to?
VAN TOFFLER: You know, Aaron, I thought you'd never ask. Justin Timberlake.
AARON WOODMAN: Timberlake, all right.
VAN TOFFLER: I hear he has a new album.
AARON WOODMAN: I can quickly find Justin Timberlake and in this case I can actually open up, and not only do I see the albums that I expect when I open up Justin Timberlake's stack, I now actually get some great programming from MTV. My favorite is the auto play mix. When I select that, I get a custom, dynamic playlist built around Justin Timberlake and artists like him. It's a great way to get fresh music.
In fact, I can actually save the feed, meaning that every time I log into the Urge music service or synchronize my device, I get the latest music, meaning that there's no stale music in my experience.
Lastly, why don't we actually take a listen to one of those tracks? (Music.) (Applause.)
JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE: Well, thanks, hi, how are you doing? This is not my usual stage. (Laughter.) But thank you for having me here tonight. I'm here because I'm the type of artist who is always interested, I'm a consumer basically as well, I'm always interested in the newest and coolest things. And from what I've seen, and you guys showed me earlier, I really think URGE is going to be it. I mean, URGE offers artists like myself a new way to specifically reach our music fans with a ton of options to play, interact and buy music.
And I've got a little secret, I want to let the cat out of the bag; when I release my new album this year, which by the way features Mr. Gates's singing debut, we'll be doing a duet - (laughter) - [singing] "Artistry and technology" - no? (Laughter.) Whatever. URGE and I will be doing - the point is URGE and I will be doing some new and creative things together, so I look forward to it and hope you guys look forward to it, and thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. (Applause.)
VAN TOFFLER: Thank you.
BILL GATES: Great, thanks.
Pretty cool.
One of the special things we've been doing with Windows is creating a tablet version. Now, this fits in with the fact that the growth in PCs was not only fantastic but portable machines are making up a higher and higher percentage. And what we want to do is get this capability, the tablet capability down so it's the mainstream of Tablet PC. We've got dozens of partners building great Tablet PCs, they're getting better and better. In fact, there are some new technologies that are going to make that price premium for this tablet capability very, very small.
Gateway is helping us lead the way with this new CS200. It's a great machine at very much a mainstream portable price.
Part of the way that we're getting this premium down is we're using new digitizers that are called passive, and that means that it will be a simple decision to say, yes, I want to get that tablet capability.
Now, we're investing a lot in this in Windows Vista. The investment is our research group, new ideas of how we adjust automatically to your handwriting style, and so as you use it, it will just get better and better.
We're taking this idea of notetaking, annotating, reading to a whole new level, and we'll have a lot of partnerships around Windows Vista where people are bringing digital content down so that consuming it on the screen instead of on paper starts to be more attractive, that the readability is there and all those rich features that you think about can become available. With OneNote we have a new version of that that will drive this forward and let us do a lot better there. So driving that to the mainstream is something we're very committed to.
New Device Partnerships
Another area of investment for us has, of course, been the Windows Mobile area, and we got into that about three years ago. We've seen a great growth in terms of getting down the learning curve, the breadth of the relationships and depth of the relationships we have. And, in fact, we've got more than a hundred Smart Phones out now with 93 mobile operators in 55 countries.
This year we'll ship more than five million devices, which is a 36 percent year over year increase, and we have some really fantastic stuff coming out this year. In fact, probably right at the top of the list I'd put this new device here. This one you probably heard about, we announced it just a few months ago. It's our partnership with Palm, and Palm does a fantastic job on their devices. Here they were able to take our platform and do a number of unique things that had never been done before. They were able to take and build an ability that they would be able to make it all work with a single-click operation.
So here you can see they made it so you can put the photos in, I can just scroll through those photos, anybody I want to call I just select and I can decide which phone number, how I want to connect up with them, and so this phone is amazing for single hand operation, amazing for nice shortcuts that are built-in, based on the experience they've had, they've brought that to the Windows Mobile platform.
This is on sale starting tomorrow. That's actually ahead of schedule, they got it done, got it approved by Verizon, who's the key partner here, because they're connecting this up to their EVDO broadband service. So the responsiveness of this device getting any sorts of attachment, music, images will be fantastic because of the bandwidth of that device. So a lot of new things that come out here and great to see their work.
We will have more variety of devices coming out this year. One will be a device from Motorola called the Q. We'll have a lot, some of which will bring high resolution cameras in, music capability in, a lot of innovation there.
We also are working with people who do wireless phones in the home, and so this is one that happens to be from Phillips. We've also got a partner Uniden doing something very similar.
This operates, has all the capabilities of that classic in the home wireless phone. You pick it up, you can connect up, make normal phone calls. But they've also built in the ability to do messenger voice over IP calls. And so you just push a button here and, in fact, you get your messenger buddy list. It's completely up to date, I can scroll through here, pick anyone, I can see their presence data and so I can also call through the Internet to any one of my buddies. In fact, this uses what we call the Windows Live Call Services that come through our partner MCI.
So this is a phone that is a very inexpensive phone, but bringing that messenger Live Call Services in along with normal phone calling.
