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Boinc returns, in Venezuela
By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 12 July 2013
So, is Beyond Oblivion, that revolutionary new digital music service best known for crashing before it even launched, back? Well, it seems so.
As previously reported, Beyond Oblivion founder Adam Kidron bought his former company’s assets through a new entity called Gee Beyond in March 2012, after the original company went under at the end of 2011. Shortly before that deal, an article in Evolver FM reviewed what had gone wrong at Beyond Oblivion, with ex-employees blaming Kidron from making various terrible decisions.
In happier times, Kidron and the Beyond Oblivion team made bold claims about their planned digital service, which – although a little confusing at first – would basically bundle an all-you-can eat streaming and download platform into devices, with royalties covered by a licence fee paid by the device maker. It was claimed that problems securing a sufficiently major device manufacturer to fuel launch was one of the original firm’s biggest issues.
But Gee Beyond has seemingly found a tel co partner in the form of Movistar, a Venezuelan subsidiary of the sometimes terrible Telefonica, and it will start bundling the service with the Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini phone, still using the Beyond Oblivion brand name Boinc, which pretty much everyone – Kidron aside – always thought was pretty awful.
Although a much more modest launch than that planned by Beyond Oblivion v1, the new firm says the Movistar alliance is the first stage of global roll out. On its website it states: “Launching exclusively in Venezuela on the Movistar network, Boinc will gradually expand to become a global eco-system of inter-connected Boinc users and devices, all sharing and opening each other’s ears to new music”.
It will be interesting to see how Boinc v2 compares to the original Beyond Oblivion platform, which was pretty much ready to go when the company went under, and certainly looked slick, bringing together a variety of elements from rival services. Playlisting and discovery – an obsession of all streaming services these days – was always very much part of the Boinc equation, and The Echo Nest has confirmed it has been hired to provide “rich music information and local music understanding” to the new service.
