The Galaxy S3 is more than a flagship smartphone for Samsung-- it also launches Music Hub, the Samsung take on online music services of both iTunes and Spotify variety.

Initially exclusive to the Galaxy S3 (but will also launch on PC and other Samsung devices soon enough), Music Hub offers streaming, radio stations, cloud-based music storage and a music store, with a catalog of 19m songs courtesy of digital content technology provider 7digital.

The service will be available in free (offering 30-second song previews) and premium (with €9.99 monthly subscription) versions.

Microsoft announces Media Center for Windows 8 will be available as an add-on-- a digital purchase one does through "Add Features" in the Control Panel.

Media Center comes free in Windows 7 Premium and Pro.

Apparently the price covers royalty costs of codecs supporting broadcast TV (DBV-T/S, ISDB-S/T, DMBH, and ATSC), VOB file playback and DVD playback. A codec all versions of Windows 8 do support is Dolby Digital Plus.

In case you are wondering the standard Windows 8 standard Media Player does Continue reading...

Even customers with the biggest of movie collections will find it difficult to fill up the FilmoScope DX-- a server with a disk capacity expandable to a maximum of 256 terabytes.

The server comes with standard storage of 14TB to store movies and albums as a single collection, and is compatible with DUNE, TWIX, Xtreamer and Popcorn Hour media players as well as players from FilmoScope Lab itself.

FilmoScope also provides DX-series servers with optional built-in 4 or 6 TI multi-zone audio, handling Continue reading...

Cloud-based music service rara.com hopes it will attract mass-market customers who don't listen to digital music-- saying 60% of consumers "never experienced any form of digital music."

To do so, rara.com employs a "simple and beautiful" web-based UI (claiming it makes listening to online music as easy as switching on the radio), licensing agreements with Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner and the services of Grammy Award winner Imogen Heap as associate editor.

Powering the service itself is Omnifone-- Continue reading...