RealNetworks has teamed with retailer Best Buy and memory-card maker SanDisk to offer a device that will work with subscription programs such as RealNetworks' Rhapsody service.
The first subscription program, with the First Piano Concerto, concludes this afternoon in Newark.
It is launching its own online subscription program, with delivery by mail, to compete with businesses like Netflix.
Ingo Metzmacher, who conducts a subscription program with the orchestra for the first time, has had a varied musical career; once a pianist with the Ensemble Modern, he is now the music director of the Hamburg Opera.
Some companies are experimenting with subscription services in which viewers are offered unlimited access to programs for a monthly fee.
Steve Necessary, a vice president at Scientific Atlanta, who has worked with subscription video on demand services like HBO's, says viewers rarely finish watching the programs they order.
Both are free, with subscription options.
A Morgan Stanley survey released back in May had 39percentt of U.S. consumers naming Netflix as offering the "best original programming" among subscription video services, with everyone else eating its dust, including HBO, which nabbed 14percentt, Amazon Prime Video (5 percent) and Showtime Networks, with a measly 3percentt of the votes.
Chains including Whole Foods Market, Hannaford, Giant Eagle and Loblaws in North America and Tesco and Intermarche in Europe have been experimenting with ugly produce programs and subscription services such as Imperfect Produce and Hungry Harvest source directly from farms and delivers weekly boxes to subscribers' homes.
The program, with works by Ligeti, Beethoven, Schoenberg and Mozart, was something he might have done on a subscription program.
