Archive for March 26, 2013

LG has revealed today that Spotify’s on-demand music streaming service will be supported on all of its smart media products released this year, including Blu-ray players and Blu-ray Home Cinema Systems.

In addition, LG says users in the United States, Europe, Australia and New Zealand will be able to download the Spotify app to “a selection” of existing hardware with Internet access next month.

Music enthusiasts will need a premium subscription, however, tied to their Spotify account in order to access the service. New customers can sign up to a one month free trial, after which they’ll need to agree to the $9.99 monthly plan, which also provides unlimited access to the firm’s various mobile apps, ad-free streaming and enhanced audio quality.

Subscribers will be able to listen to Spotify’s existing music library, now boasting over 20 million tracks, as well as Spotify Radio for automatically generated playlists related to a specific genre or artist.

There’s no detail yet on which LG hardware will support the service, although the company has detailed the BH9530TW, a 9.1 channel home cinema system, as a notable example.

Similar to other TV manufacturers, such as Samsung and Panasonic, LG is partnering with a number of major content providers to bolster its smart platform. Spotify will be joining BBC iPlayer, on-demand TV and movie services Netflix and LOVEFiLM, as well as social media services such as YouTube, Facbook and Twitter.

Spotify has also teamed up with Microsoft and music intelligence firm The Echo Nest to launch a new visual tool called Mixshape, which can automatically organize playlists based on the genre and ‘mood’ of individual tracks.

Keen to muscle out rivals Rdio, Deezer and Xbox Music, the streaming service also launched its first-ever advertising campaign, called “For Music”.

It follows a number of other user incentives, such as the removal of the five plays-per-song restriction in the UK, as well a browser-based Web player currently in beta.

For those keeping count, Spotify now has in excess of 24 million active users, with more than 6 million paying subscribers. Since launch, Spotify claims it has paid out more than $500 million to rights-holders.

Japanese video game publisher Square Enix has announced today that its President and CEO Yoichi Wada will be stepping down. Yousuke Matsuda, the company’s Representative Director, will be taking the helm moving forward.

Wada has led Square Enix since 2000 and there is no word yet on whether he will move into a new role within the company.

It follows a revision to its consolidated results forecast for this fiscal year, which was described as an “extraordinary loss” in a report published yesterday.

Expected net sales were reduced from 150,000 million to 145,000 million, with net income falling from 3.5 billion yen ($37m USD) to a loss of 13 billion yen ($138m USD).

Square Enix has attributed the poor performance to “slow sales of major console game titles in North American and European markets”, perhaps pointing to some relatively lacklustre sales figures for Sleeping Dogs, Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Hitman: Absolution.

The publisher also said that it was experiencing “sluggish” revenues from its arcade machine business, which has long been a reliable money-maker in Japan.

Square Enix is therefore in a bit of a bind. The company has decided to introduce some major reforms and restructuring for its business models, development cycle and organisational hierarchy. As a result of these changes, Square Enix will lose roughly 10 billion yen.

Japanese video game development is in a difficult place right now. Critics have argued that developers have failed to shift with the times, producing multiple iterations of well-loved franchises that fail to innovate or recognize developments in the West.

There are exceptions to this rule – Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls have been a cult hit and the Monster Hunter franchise is starting to take a hold – but the Final Fantasy franchise has been a major casualty.

Square Enix’s beloved series is arguably on a downward spiral, selling less copies on the current generation of hardware due to an incredibly linear structure in Final Fantasy XIII and almost nonsensical narrative in its direct sequel, Final Fantasy XIII-2.

The publisher has also struggled to ship games in a timely fashion. Final Fantasy Versus XIII, directed by Tetsuya Nomura, was originally unveiled in May 2006, but the team is yet to deliver even a demo. Final Fantasy Type-0, a PlayStation Portable title, was released in Japan in October 2011, but still hasn’t seen an international launch.

There are a few notable titles that could change Square Enix’s fate; a relaunch of its failed MMO, Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn is on the horizon, and Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy 13 is in development.

It’s fair to say though that Matsuda has his work cut out for him.

Image Credit: popculturegeek/Flickr

Last week, Google unveiled Keep, a note-taking service similar to, but much more limited than, established apps like Evernote and Apple’s Notes. But there’s another service to which Google Keep bears an uncanny resemblance: Voice Actions, an Android feature Google launched more than two-and-a-half years ago, only to see it almost completely eclipsed by Apple’s Siri.

It’s no wonder, then, that Google Keep is essentially Voice Actions with a fresh coat of paint. Although Keep improves upon Voice Actions in a few ways, there’s a great degree of overlap between the two. And, in some cases, Voice Actions is simply better.

As a note-taking and reminder app, Keep takes aim at both Evernote and Apple’s Notes. But it’s worth, er, noting, that each major smartphone platform now has its own dedicated note-taking app: Google Keep, Apple’s Notes, and OneNote for Windows Phone. And, of course, there are a number of other competitors.

Google Keep’s functionality really boils down to just three features: quick notes, checklists, and photos. Keep can also transcribe (and maintain recordings of) notes that you input via voice, which Android already does for SMS messages, Twitter tweets, Facebook posts, and a number of other apps within Android. Google Keep may have inspired multi-page reviews, but you should pick up the basics within minutes. 

How Voice Actions Beats Keep

With the right command words, however, Voice Actions can do many of the same things, albeit in a slightly different format. With Keep, you must open Keep, and then choose one of the four actions (or enter a Quick Note at the top). Choosing a Note allows you to select a title, enter the note, and save. With Voice Actions, just trigger the mic, say “Note to self,” and the note. Android will transcribe it while you watch, pause for a split second for your review, and then announce, “Saving note” – which it then emails to your Gmail for later review.

Likewise, saying “Remind me to go the dentist at 3″ with Voice Actions creates a Google Calendar event for 3 PM, identifying the location as “the dentist”. That’s miles ahead of Keep, which merely creates a note to that effect. 

Keep’s one advantage seems to be the checklist, which creates a to-do list that you can check off as you accomplish it. Voice Actions has nothing comparable. (It could; imagine a list triggered by “to do”: “To do: go to the store, buy milk, phone grandma.”) What I’d like to see in Keep is a checklist that could be shared with someone else in real time, so that by the time I arrived at the store I knew exactly what my wife wanted me to buy.

Why Voice Actions Didn’t Keep

Google has always struck as me as a for-profit university of sorts, with the broadest of mission statements: “Go forth and collect data, which you shall then sell ads against.” Keep either seems be a recognition that Google’s earlier efforts with Voice Actions failed to generate the attention they deserved – or, equally likely, that another of Google’s product teams merely reinvented the wheel.

Call it what you will — the tyranny of the masses, entropy, or just a growing fascination with ephemera — the truth of the matter is that as more and more free and low-cost applications are hurled at consumers, there is less and less time to become familiar with The Next Big Thing before it, too, is superseded. Voice Actions is a solid, fundamental piece of Google tech, but it simply isn’t as integral to the Android experience as say, Apple’s Siri is to that of the iPhone.

If this is true, then perhaps Keep will incorporate other Google technologies which have been somewhat forgotten: image recognition (Google Goggles by another name), collaboration (Google Apps, anyone?), or shared location (Google Latitude). 

Stick around long enough in Silicon Valley, and someone will come up with a new twist on an old idea. Even, sometimes, within the same company.

In the United States, the smartphone contract is king. T-Mobile, the smallest of the major American wireless carriers, wants to end the reign of two-year contracts, phone subsidies and early termination fees. It even argues it can save you money in the process.

Well, at least part of that is true.

T-Mobile is instituting its plan to kill the subsidy-and-contract model for U.S. smartphone buyers. Instead of paying one lump sum for a smartphone and 24 months worth of contract, consumers can pay a minimal upfront cost of a smartphone and then a monthly fee as part of their bill.

For instance, if you want to buy a Samsung Galaxy S3 with 16GB of storage from T-Mobile, you can pay $69.99 up front and then $20 a month on top of your phone bill for 24 months. If buyers prefer, they can pay the full amount of the phone up front and skip the monthly installments. 

T-Mobile’s wireless plans start at $50 for one line and 500 MB of data. Users get 2GB of data for $60 and unlimited data for $70. Add the monthly smartphone fee into the equation and users are still going to get cellphone bills between $70-$100 on a monthly basis. 

How The Numbers Break Down

On one hand, consumers will be happy with the fact that they are not on a contract. Ostensibly, that means they can leave whenever they want. But that still have to have to pay for the smartphone they bought. One way or another, users are going to pay for the entire unsubsidized portion of your new smartphone.

For instance, if you choose to get a Samsung Galaxy S3, you are going to eventually pay $550 for the phone. You pay $70 up front plus the $20 fee per a month. If you get the get the unlimited data plan at $70 a month, your total cost is $2,230 for the life of the phone. If you go with the bottom-tier plan at 500MB of data, the total cost of ownership is $1,750. The most popular tiered plan will likely be the $60/month for 2GB of data. That will run you a total $1,990.

T-Mobile does have cheaper phones available. The Windows Phone 8X from HTC costs $0 at checkout and $18 a month for a total of $432. A Nexus 4 will cost you a down payment of $49.99 and $17 a month for a total of $457.00.

Let’s compare T-Mobile to ATT, which uses the “traditional” subsidy model. If we go with the baseline plan for ATT, we are paying $40 for 450 minutes of voice time and unlimited texts (an unlimited voice plan will go for $70). Then you add in a data plan tier. The most popular is 3GB for $30. That is $70 a month, or $1,680 over a 24-month contract. Now, assume that you paid for a $200 subsidized iPhone or brand-new Android. That shakes out to $1,880.

So, if we look at the baseline plan plus cost of device between ATT and T-Mobile, you actually pay less on a contract with Ma Bell than you do with Big Pink over 24 months. Depending on the smartphone you buy, you can end up paying more per month and over a 24-month period with T-Mobile.

Does that contract really look so bad now?

T-Mobile’s Motivations

If you ever listen to a quarterly earnings call from the executives at ATT or Verizon, they often lament the damage to their bottom line that smartphone subsidies do to them. You may pay $199.99 for a new Samsung Galaxy device from Verizon but the carrier is paying the full $550. That is millions of dollars in upfront costs that the carriers absorb.

The iPhone is especially cumbersome on carriers’ bottom lines and the more smartphones the carriers sell, the worse for wear their quarterly earnings are. ATT, Verizon and Sprint (and yes, T-Mobile) make up the money through the life of a contract. If a user wants out of that contract, they have to pay an early termination fee. 

T-Mobile is doing away with the subsidy by passing on the cost of the phone directly to the consumer. You may not be on a contract, per se, but you are still going to pay a termination fee (the remaining cost of the device plus any other T-Mobile fees) if you want to leave. 

T-Mobile will also allow users to bring their own smartphones with them. So, if you have an unlocked iPhone from ATT, all you need to do is get a $10 T-Mobile SIM card and activate it on T-Mobile. That way T-Mobile doesn’t have to deal with the smartphone manufacturer at all and can just make money providing data. Too bad it is currently illegal to unlock your cellphone. 

The aim for T-Mobile is to take over the bottom of the smartphone market in the U.S. Users that do not need a lot of data and want a very cheap phone can do very well on T-Mobile’s plan. If you want an older phone, like the Samsung Galaxy Exhibit, you will pay $240 for the phone and $1,200 for 500MB of data a month over 24 months. Unless you want to get a straight pre-paid plan from the likes of Cricket, that is about as cheap as it gets among the four major carriers.

The fact of the matter is that, one way or another, you are going to pay both the carrier and the smartphone manufacturer. There is really no way around it. The wireless carriers in the U.S. will always try to convince you that their service is better, faster, cheaper. The fact of the matter is that you will pay nearly the same (within a couple hundred dollars) no matter which carrier you choose. 

If you want a new, top-end smartphone, you are likely better off with the two-year contract from one of the larger carriers. 

For decades the enterprise software industry has grown fat on outsized, upfront license fees coupled with ongoing, high-margin maintenance streams. Cracks in the model have threatened  to dismantle the system for years, as reported by The Wall Street Journal back in 2009, with CIOs chafing at paying for low-value, high-cost maintenance.

But if Oracle’s big earnings miss last week is any indication, one of three disappointing quarters over the past two years, the cracks have widened to a chasm. As bellwether for the enterprise software incumbents, Oracle’s miss suggests that the legacy vendors may struggle to adapt to the world of open-source software and Software as a Service (SaaS) and, in particular, the subscription revenue models that drive both.

It isn’t going to be pretty.

Changing How Vendors Get Paid

This isn’t just a matter of improving legacy software products. It’s a matter of fundamentally changing how these legacy vendors deploy and charge for software. For example, Oracle’s entire cost structure is built around the premise of a hefty upfront license and high-margin maintenance (Over 20% of the license fee). Ever read The Innovator’s Dilemma? Clayton Christensen’s classic addresses just this sort of inability for established companies to change. It turns out to be brutally hard, and often impossible.

Small wonder, then, that SAP has been raising its maintenance fees, trying to milk more money from its customer base as it faces serious headwinds maintaining its license model against upstart competitors like Workday:

Such actions basically force customers to start looking elsewhere, if they weren’t already.

If this were just a matter of technology, Oracle, Microsoft et al. would likely weather the storm quite well. Oracle makes great software. There’s a reason it’s the enterprise database leader, and by a wide margin (though smaller rivals are gaining in popularity).

But building great technology is not enough. Oracle’s peers, from SAP to IBM to Microsoft, also charge for software in this way, and across the industry they’ve been taking a beating as enterprises look to the improved productivity and OpEx of open source and SaaS. Oracle, for its part, blamed its miss on “sales execution,” but as Cowen Co. analyst Peter Goldmacher points out,

…[W]e have a hard time believing that almost all the legacy software names are suffering from poor sales execution at the same time. We believe the primary issue is a fundamental shift in the technology landscape away from legacy systems towards a new breed of better products at a lower cost both in Apps and in Data Management. Virtually every emerging software trend is having a deflationary impact on spend.

Not everyone sees it this way. Wells Fargo senior analyst Jason Maynard urges investors in Oracle to “keep calm and carry on,” and expects Oracle’s license revenue to grow 5% year over year. 

Good luck with that. 

Developers Rise In Importance

The problem isn’t that Oracle and the mega-vendors have lost their hold on CIO affections. They haven’t. The problem is that they have little to offer enterprise developers, who increasingly are the gateway to software adoption. Explaining this shift in his excellent The New Kingmakers, Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady argues:

With the rise of open source…developers could for the first time assemble an infrastructure from the same pieces that industry titans like Google used to build their businesses — only at no cost, without seeking permission from anyone. For the first time, developers could route around traditional procurement with ease. With usage thus effectively decoupled from commercial licensing, patterns of technology adoption began to shift….

Open source is increasingly the default mode of software development….In new market categories, open source is the rule, proprietary software the exception.

The top-down approach, in other words, is losing its currency within the enterprise, as both open source and cloud enable developers (not to mention line of business executives) to get work done without getting permission.

The effect on the mega-vendors is overwhelmingly negative, as Oppenheimer analyst Brian Schwartz posits:

We believe something more secular is occurring as cloud computing increasingly entices CIOs to refresh their legacy IT systems with cloud services rather than infrastructure. Additionally, software purchasing is becoming more decentralized with decision-making power shifting away from IT and weakening the selling advantage as a “one-shop supplier.” These trends dampen big-ticket on-premise software purchasing and remain a headwind for the infrastructure vendors.

None of which means the big vendors are going out of business anytime soon. In my years at Novell, for example, I witnessed a serious decline in the company’s fortunes, even as revenue remained above $1 billion.

Time To Change?

In fact, Novell is a great example of what might happen to the mega-vendors. Ultimately, Novell had to be bought out and then split into pieces in order for its SUSE business unit, now an independent company, to thrive. SUSE can now support its subscription model without all the overhead Novell’s legacy business imposed on it.

The same may well prove true for the other enterprise mega-vendors.

Not all enterprises will be affected equally, of course. Years ago IBM reshaped its business to be more services driven, which allows it to embrace new trends like open source enthusiastically. And even Oracle has built out a considerable cloud business (despite starting years later than it arguably should have), to which it can move current customers. Microsoft has been doing the same, transitioning customers to Office 365 rather than lose out on customers moving to Google Docs.

But the revenue profile for these businesses differs significantly from the traditional license/maintenance business, and it’s an open question whether any of these companies will be able to turn the corner in their current form.

The Wall Street Journal echoed this sentiment, suggesting that Oracle’s “business is being eroded at the edges by smaller, more focused companies offering newer technology,” and, I would add, by the very different business models these firms employ. It’s a great time to be in enterprise technology…so long as you’re not selling a legacy business model. 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Hot off a new round of funding, Big Switch Networks says it now has open-source and commercial software to help companies scale out networks more easily and cheaply with commodity switches, further threatening the likes of legacy network gear sellers.

Big Switch’s new Switch Light software implements the OpenFlow networking protocol in physical and virtual switches. It lets data center administrators automatically and centrally send out policies from one location when new switches are added to the network, instead of having to go through with a time-consuming, hands-on process.

The open-source version of Switch Light is available for free because “we want to make sure (OpenFlow) industry standards are enabled in the data plane,” said Jason Matlof, vice president of marketing at Big Switch. The commercial version comes with technical support and is more scalable and highly available than the open-source version, Matlof said.

Switch Light is based on existing open-source technology developed a few years ago under the name Indigo. Customers can sign up to use the Switch Light software under a licensing agreement along with Big Switch’s other software-defined networking products — the Big Switch Controller for the network’s control plane, the Big Virtual Switch and the Big Tap monitoring program.

Consider the news another blow to Cisco, as the Big Switch software is aimed at customers that want to move away from lock-in from the legacy network hardware vendor and shift elements of their network stacks to white-label suppliers. Cisco still holds 65 percent of marketshare for Ethernet switches. Arista and Juniper play here, too.

As I reported earlier this month, Quanta Computer is keen on selling network gear such as switches directly to companies through a newly formed subsidiary, Quanta QCT, just as it has shifted from a primarily original-design manufacturer to a direct seller of servers. Quanta and other commodity switch makers, such as Supermicro, could benefit from the Switch Light release as well.

All eyes are on Cisco and Arista to make the next move. Meanwhile, as the Switch Light affords Big Switch a more rounded out product line, the company could again look like a good buy, just as it did last summer.

What’s the deal with SMS-enabled phone numbers? Bandwidth has prepared an ebook providing essential information for application developers and service providers interested in learning more about this growing market opportunity. You’ll learn:

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Europe’s digital agenda chief, Neelie Kroes, may have lost all her funding for ensuring fast broadband coverage across the continent by 2020, but she’s still not giving up hope. Her latest push, unveiled on Tuesday, has two main strands: cutting some of the red tape around deploying 4G masts and antennas, and changing regulations around civil works.

The European Commission reckons 80 percent of high-speed network deployment costs are to do with civil engineering, mostly digging up roads. For example, it may be that a road is being dug up anyway for the laying of new waterworks or electricity cables, and it would be a no-brainer to lay some fiber in there at the same time – however, in many European countries that kind of coordination is not in place, and that’s what Kroes wants to fix.

Kroes maintains that this could take €40-60 billion ($51-77 billion) off the overall cost of deploying fiber-based broadband in Europe. She also wants rules brought in to ensure that newly-built or renovated buildings have the necessary equipment in order to receive fiber directly to the premises, and to mandate reasonably-priced open access conditions on infrastructure such as ducts and poles.

On the mobile front, Kroes says permits for new masts and antennas should be granted or refused within six months. Her office is painting all of these changes as cuts to red tape – while this interpretation may be debatable, as some of the changes would actually involve new rules, the overall result would at least be one of more efficient bureaucracy.

“Everyone deserves fast broadband. I want to burn the red tape that is stopping us for getting there,” Kroes said in a statement. “The European Commission wants to make it quicker and cheaper to get that broadband.”

Kroes’s Digital Agenda office intends to see, by 2020, that everyone in Europe has access to at least 30Mbps broadband, and that half the EU is able to surf at 100Mbps or more. She recently threw €50 million in the direction of “5G” research, so that mobile can carry more of the load in meeting those goals.

Rev.com, a freelancer marketplace founded by early oDesk employees, is today announcing $4.5 million in Series A funding led by Venky Ganesan of Globespan Capital Partners. Also participating in the round were Craig Sherman (former COO of Ancestry.com) and Austin Ligon (founder of CarMax). All three are now members of Rev.com’s board of directors, following the round which closed back in August 2012.

The company had actually been quietly operating under different branding for the past couple of years, but today it’s now publicly launching as “Rev.com.” It’s a name that co-founder and CEO Jason Chicola explains is meant to reflect the company’s focus on using technology to increase the turnaround speed on customers’ projects.

Chicola says that the idea for Rev.com was inspired by his time at oDesk, a well-known freelancer marketplace. He started the site with co-founder Josh Breinlinger, also of oDesk, but who is no longer involved at Rev.com day-to-day. (He’s currently a venture partner at Sigma West, but still sits on Rev.com’s board.)

“We saw work-from-home as a huge trend – and we think it’s barely in its first inning – but we also saw ways to do it better,” says Chicola of the original inspiration. “What we observed is that the thing that makes work-from-home tough for businesses is that it’s really hard to manage workers who are far away.”

Businesses have a tough time interacting with people who are overseas and in different time zones, he explains. There is also the hassle involved with having to select the best workers from a large pool of possible freelancers, leaving business customers unsure of what the final results will be.

To solve the former challenge, Rev.com steps in to act as middleman, managing the freelancer workers itself. And as for the latter, it focuses on screening workers in advance, and proofreading their projects upon completion. The company doesn’t let in everyone like many freelancer sites do, but instead only accepts around 10 percent of those who apply. Applicants have to pass a formal screening process involving tests indicative of the types of jobs Rev.com offers. A second pool of pre-qualified freelancers works then makes sure that the quality of these workers’ efforts remain high by proofing and grading projects upon completion.

Today, the company is focused on two areas: audio transcriptions and translations. But it’s planning to grow its services lineup to include other popular work-from-home job types in the near future. Pricing for these services is displayed on Rev.com’s homepage. (It’s $1 per min. transcription; 12 cents per word business translation; $33 per page certified translation). Rev.com takes its cut of each project, paying workers a little over half of what it charges businesses for the work performed.

Chicola explains that what makes Rev.com different from other freelancer marketplaces isn’t just the way its business is structured – it’s the focus on developing an online technology platform that helps freelancers speed up and streamline their processes. For example, the transcription product that Rev.com offers freelance workers will have special features designed for their needs, like ways to rewind the audio by a set number of seconds, tools to quickly denote each speaker’s name while transcribing, ways to create shortcuts for words that appear often or are complex terms that could be easily misspelled, and more.

Plus, he adds, “by having this transcription environment in our browser, the worker doesn’t have to download the file separately and upload it somewhere else…they can just play and go.” Chicola says its platform is about “half done,” but continuing to build out the product is one of the key things the new funding will be put towards.

In order to attract talent, Rev.com focuses on giving workers more jobs and helping them complete those jobs more quickly, though Chicola admits that Rev.com doesn’t pay the most on a per-job basis.

“On most sites that are out there, workers spend half their time or more looking for work – that’s time they’re not getting paid,” he says. “We designed our whole system to keep them busy. If we can keep them higher utilized, they can make more money per week than somewhere else.” He also notes that at Rev.com, the goal is also to offer freelancers a “nice” place to work, where they can make friends, have a good social environment, where they think it’s fair, and where they can get recognized for their work.

Today, Rev.com translators make on average around $1,000 per month part-time, while some of the busier workers make up to $4,000 per month. Transcriptionists tend to make around a quarter of that.

As noted above, Rev.com had quietly launched its services in 2010, beginning with translations, followed by transcriptions in late 2011. These were under different branding (FoxTranscribe and FoxTranslate). During this open beta of sorts, the company grew its user base to include a combined total of around 1,000 regular business customers, including Pfizer, VisaNow (global immigration), U.S. Bank, NYU, Land O’ Lakes and Princeton University, as well as several government agencies, such as the National Park Service and U.S. Small Business Administration. On the transcription side in particular, 20 percent of its user base is the media, which uses it for transcribing interviews.

The company will continue its product development and hire additional engineers. Interested users can sign up here for Rev.com services.

• REV

Rev is a place to work for the best freelancers.

Rev’s proprietary technology platform is built to create a great work environment for translators and transcriptionists, so we can deliver clients ever increasing speed and quality.

Rev’s mission is to give more people the freedom to work from home. We are bringing the best of the office to our online workplace. We believe that attracting the best workers is the key to delivering great service to our customers.

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No, Spotify has not just officially announced a reported move into video services, but the music streaming startup is continuing to put itself into the same places where video is. Today, Spotify announced with LG that it would be integrating its premium, paid service on to a range of connected media devices from the consumer electronics giant. Devices will include Blu-ray home cinema systems, speakers and more, and they will start getting sold in April. To be clear, the LG deal will only cover music: Spotify has a catalog of some 20 million tracks that it offers across 26 countries in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and across Europe.

As with previous smart device deals — Spotify also has an agreement with Samsung, announced in October 2012, to integrate into its smart TV content platform — the LG deal is geared towards driving more usage of Spotify’s premium service. For $9.99 per month, this lets users extend their Spotify listening from PC-only to other devices.

For Spotify, as more consumer electronics devices get linked up to the Internet, this creates an ever-expanding range of end points for its service, helping it to scale and find more paid subscribers. On the hardware makers’ part, adding in already-popular services like Spotify helps them sell the idea of premium, connected consumer electronics to consumers. As with other peripheral device deals, LG consumers will get a one-month trial free. Other hardware deals include integrations with Roku, TiVo, Sonos, Onkyo, Logitech, Western Digital, Boxee and Ford and Volvo.

Included in the in initial wave of LG devices will be the company’s high-end speaker system, the catchily-named BH9530TW, as well as its Blu-ray media players. These already feature a long lineup of premium content including games, social media services like YouTube and Facebook, Netflix, and Lovefilm in the UK.

Asked about the reports that surfaced yesterday around a move into video and how they might relate to today’s news, a spokesperson for Spotify declined to comment to TechCrunch. However, comments made to CNET prior to yesterday point to the company partnering with video providers before embarking on a standalone service itself, were it to move into video at all.

“I don’t know what the user experience would be where we would do that considerably better than anyone else,” Ek told the site. “If we did think we could make it better than YouTube or Vevo, then maybe. But it would seem easier to partner with them.”

With would-be competitors like Rdio also working on video (appropriately called Vdio), and providers like Apple (via iTunes) already providing both media, offering both would not be a stretch, even if for now Spotify remains firmly set on growing its platform as a place for music.

“It’s our mission to make all the world’s music available instantly to everyone, everywhere, so we’re delighted to partner with LG to make our music service available on their smart media devices,” said Kate Opekar, director of hardware business development at Spotify, in a statement. “Spotify wants to be at the heart of the home entertainment experience, so it’s a natural fit to make our music service available on Blu-ray players and home cinema systems.”