American U. Drops Ruckus; Not All Barriers In Providers’ Control

The school originally went with Ruckus’s comprehensive music, movie, TV and community forum services because it was “immediately available and technologically simple,” American U. Exec. Dir.-Housing & Dining Programs Julie Weber told us. The trial was funded by a donor to see if students liked the service enough to pay for it next academic year. Late in the semester American did an online survey and focus groups on Ruckus service, and found “a couple of key points of concern,” Weber said. Students complained they had trouble finding music they wanted in Ruckus’s library -- about 600,000 tracks at the time -- and couldn’t download tracks to MP3 players.

The breadth of Ruckus’s offering was overkill, Weber said: “They were not interested” in any of the movies, TV or community forum features. Facebook.com, an MIT-created social networking site, was already a popular community forum for students, she added: “I think they want to pick and choose.” But student testers were “loud and clear” that they would like a more narrowly tailored music delivery service for about $25 a semester. Ruckus couldn’t comment by our deadline.

After testing of Napster, Rhapsody and Cdigix this summer, American U. students gave the clear edge to Napster. Its 1.5 million track library was popular with student testers, who found all the tracks they wanted, officials said. The school is in “the final stages of signing the contract” with Napster but doesn’t know the pricing scheme yet, Weber said. American will use NapsterLite, which offers unlimited downloads to PC. Students can sign up individually for Napster to Go for a fee to be determined, Weber said. Any service will face the challenge of free P2P offerings. In the late semester survey, students were asked which legal download service they would prefer, and “the first several that they wanted were all illegal P2P,” Weber said. But as awareness grows of recording industry lawsuits against P2P users, especially college students, the legal danger “is finally starting to get through to students,” she said.

University-provided services are still going through much tweaking, industry watchers told us. “Most of these deals just got signed for this past school year,” but the next couple years should provide better indications of success, said Eric Garland, BigChampagne CEO: “For the most part we're still in the dating game.” Digital Media Assn. Exec. Dir. Jonathan Potter called the university services a “bake-off” -- good for testing different combinations of features, but not significant in the long term. Limited music libraries are the biggest obstacle now, Potter added: “The kids want to have every song that’s available on Grokster.”

But the details aren’t as important as the “fundamentals” of licensing and compatibility. “At a certain point, the variables… really have more to do with the media companies” than the “very compelling offering” of Ruckus, Garland said. The recording industry controls music compatibility and usability, and is heavily investing in DRM, which limits the market to a “single- digit fraction” of total music sales: “Imagine a world where Sony CDs only played with Sony CD players,” he said. “The reason people like burning their friends’ CDs [is] that the result works with their existing music collection.” Potter blamed music licensing laws for hindering wider track availability: “It’s not possible to compete in a fair legal way with Grokster” until Congress takes action. But just as satellite TV and cable overcame low consumer interest with wider programming options, Potter is optimistic university-provided media services will succeed.