Rival technologies that baffle consumers will run more companies out of business in the nascent music download market than will head-to-head competition, one of the lead creators of MP3 playback technology warned on Wednesday.
"It has slowed the download business for sure, and it's doing the same for the gadget makers," said Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg, director of electronic media technologies at the Fraunhofer Institut in Ilemenau, Germany.
Consumers nowadays can store thousands of songs in a pocket-sized device, play music and videos on their mobile phones and buy albums at the click of a button. But to their chagrin, a bewildering number of competing playback compression technologies and anti-piracy software options determine which songs play on which devices.
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News source: Reuters
