This is entirely speculation (I have no inside insight) but I can think of a large number of commercial and legal reasons why the Deezer plugin may operate like this. It's also not unusual - you can select individual, full tracks to play via the Last.fm website, but not via the official plugin.
Deezer has (after a very tortous and well documented process) negotiated rights for itself to stream on-demand full tracks from its website. It will have done this with two groups of people - the rightsholders themselves and the regulators. We have no way of knowing what is in the agreements with the rightsholders, but they may also impact on what Deezer can do with third parties, or it may require Deezer to go and get further agreements with the rightsholders every time they want to give a third party like Slim Devices access to their services (this is quite common). As others have mentioned, there may be restrictions on SD itself based on other agreements it has with third party providers. Also, Deezer may not want to give full functionality for commercial reasons - by offering limited, free, functionality through SD you create awareness of the service but still have the prospect of driving traffic to the Deezer site. Or the price offered for full streaming functionality was too high for SD, so they went for a more limited model. Finally, there are the regulatory issues - here, Europe is in a pretty sorry state compared with the US. There is no single model or regulator to deal with and each country seeks to impose its own licencing requirements. Some are easier to deal with than others (and this I do have direct knowledge of). Some countries draw a distinction between streaming via web pages and streaming via third party hardware, that may be an issue in this case. These are just the initial thoughts that occur to me - there are probably many more. I doubt SD will comment on commercial issues - the agreements will no doubt be subject to confidentiality provisions - and I wouldn't expect them to in any event, particularly when they've just increased the functionality of the Squeezeboxes, for free, albeit to a limited group of users. As someone who really loved Pandora until is was withdrawn from non-US users, I understand the frustration. However, if it was as easy as that to get relevant streaming worldwide streaming licences - surely everyone would be doing it? -- Siduhe Who am I on 'LAST.FM' (http://www.last.fm/user/siduhe)? "-Siduhe Loved Tracks radio got the thumbs up. Feedback included: yeah, it's good... got the odd dodgy track tho...-" (c) 'ModelCitizen' (http://www.last.fm/user/Modelcitizen) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Siduhe's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=723 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=55928 _______________________________________________ squeezenetwork mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/squeezenetwork
