Apple Computer Inc yesterday introduced a broadcast feature to its red-hot iPod digital music players in Taiwan, hoping to secure a bigger market among music lovers locally.
The feature, Podcast Directory service, is an audio program that users pull off the Internet and download onto digital music players or similar devices for listening to at their leisure.
"We are working with 10 radio stations here and consumers will be able to listen to them over at iTunes within a month," Yeo Eng Yiong, Apple's product marketing manager for portables in the Asia-Pacific region, said at a media briefing yesterday.
These radio stations include UFO Radio (飛碟電台), Kiss Radio, Broadcasting Corp of China (中廣) and International Community Radio Taipei (ICRT), he said, adding that the company may add more partners to the service at a later stage.
Besides the 10 channels, the service in iTunes, its digital music software and online music store, features over 3,000 free overseas audio programs, making it one of the largest Podcast directories in the world, featuring favorites such as ABC News, BBC, Disney, ESPN and Newsweek.
According to Yeo, integrating broadcasting with digital music players has been gaining popularity among consumers over the last two years. The company therefore incorporated this new feature in iTunes in June this year, "hoping to offer more content to users," he said.
The company claimed that just two days after the launch of its Podcast Directory in the US, iTunes customers have subscribed to more than 1 million Podcasts.
According to Yeo, over 20 million iPods have been sold worldwide as of June. He declined to reveal the sales figures in Taiwan.
According to the latest statistics from research company GfK, iPod is Taiwan's No. 1 digital music player in terms of sales.
Despite reaping great profits from iPod sales, Apple is still hesitant to bring its iTunes Music Store to Taiwan, because local consumers are still downloading songs via peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing Web sites instead of using online music stores.
A court ruling that favors P2P file-sharing platforms further scares prospective online music vendors from entering the market.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) would not produce its most advanced technologies in the US next year, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. Kuo made the comment during an appearance at the legislature, hours after the chipmaker announced that it would invest an additional US$100 billion to expand its manufacturing operations in the US. Asked by Taiwan People’s Party Legislator-at-large Chang Chi-kai (張啟楷) if TSMC would allow its most advanced technologies, the yet-to-be-released 2-nanometer and 1.6-nanometer processes, to go to the US in the near term, Kuo denied it. TSMC recently opened its first US factory, which produces 4-nanometer
GREAT SUCCESS: Republican Senator Todd Young expressed surprise at Trump’s comments and said he expects the administration to keep the program running US lawmakers who helped secure billions of dollars in subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing rejected US President Donald Trump’s call to revoke the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, signaling that any repeal effort in the US Congress would fall short. US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who negotiated the law, on Wednesday said that Trump’s demand would fail, while a top Republican proponent, US Senator Todd Young, expressed surprise at the president’s comments and said he expects the administration to keep the program running. The CHIPS Act is “essential for America leading the world in tech, leading the world in AI [artificial
REACTIONS: While most analysts were positive about TSMC’s investment, one said the US expansion could disrupt the company’s supply-demand balance Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) new US$100 billion investment in the US would exert a positive effect on the chipmaker’s revenue in the medium term on the back of booming artificial intelligence (AI) chip demand from US chip designers, an International Data Corp (IDC) analyst said yesterday. “This is good for TSMC in terms of business expansion, as its major clients for advanced chips are US chip designers,” IDC senior semiconductor research manager Galen Zeng (曾冠瑋) said by telephone yesterday. “Besides, those US companies all consider supply chain resilience a business imperative,” Zeng said. That meant local supply would
Servers that might contain artificial intelligence (AI)-powering Nvidia Corp chips shipped from the US to Singapore ended up in Malaysia, but their actual final destination remains a mystery, Singaporean Minister for Home Affairs and Law K Shanmugam said yesterday. The US is cracking down on exports of advanced semiconductors to China, seeking to retain a competitive edge over the technology. However, Bloomberg News reported in late January that US officials were probing whether Chinese AI firm DeepSeek (深度求索) bought advanced Nvidia semiconductors through third parties in Singapore, skirting Washington’s restrictions. Shanmugam said the route of the chips emerged in the course of an
RSS