Unicorn Media, a Silverlight-based music/video-streaming service, launched at this year's SXSW conference. The service gives artists a way to offer their music and video content for high-quality streaming while participating in ad-based revenue sharing. The media that Unicorn Media offers will only be pro-quality or near-pro quality -no fuzzy videos here.

The bands and video producers featured on the site will be contacted by the company in advance and will have to sign a distribution deal to be featured, but it's non-exclusive, so the artists can still put their content out on other services, like iTunes, or on their own site.

Artists using Unicorn can upload as many high-def files as they want and the videos they upload will have integrated advertising. Because the ads are built with Silverlight, the content producers can determine how many ads they want and where they should fall. Once online, Unicorn sends artists a monthly check based on traffic and CPM for the ads.

Right now, the site is streaming only, but downloads will be available soon.

There are so many mobile phones in use nowadays that it would be enough for half of our planet's population.
The first mobiles appered 26 years ago. According to the latest survey there are 3.3 billion phones in use worldwide today. Of course, it doesn't necessarily mean that every second person on Earth owns a mobile phone. The reason is that it is common to have two or even more devices per person in almost 60 countries while there are no phones at all in some parts of the globe.
People don't use their phones for-calls-only anymore. Also devices with Windows Mobile system are becoming increasingly popular.
When I'd visited Redmond campus (Microsoft headquaters) I was lucky enough to be introduced to the musician who composes ringtones for these mobiles. Benjamin Bethurum is one of the coolest and most energetic people I've ever met. You could've come across his music also on the Czech radio station - Radio 1 few months ago. Benjamin is going to release a new CD soon and it is going to compete also in one of the Czech hitparades.

So you’ve gotten all your Guitar Hero II achievements already and you’re looking to pick up a new instrument. You might want to try the Roll Up USB Drum Set by Dreamcheeky. For $30 you can be busting out your best Neil Peart on XP and Windows 2000 (a company spokesperson told me they are working on Vista drivers right now.) Ok, so they aren't a Simmons cage, but one interesting feature is that you can record your tracks and email them to your friends, who I’m sure will immediately flag all your email as spam.

While there seems to be a new social networking web site/service every week, it’s important to remember that publicly-shared music collections are the original gangster in the game of meeting fellow keyboard jockeys. Look over the shoulder of any college student, and you’ll find that every student with spare disk space has titled their collections with their screen name and room number. Windows Media Player does enable this glorious functionality, but as always the right switches to flip can sometimes be hard to find.

Jason Reindorp, marketing director for Zune, made some waves today with his comments on the upcoming plans for the group. The noise made around Zune will only increase as the year marches on toward the next inevitable holiday buying season. More colors, marketing, and features can’t come Zune enough according to Jeremy at Ars Technica. However there is something far more interesting to consider, and to talk about it, we should start with mobile phones and cars (bear with us).

Cingular makes their money when people pay a recurring fee to use their cellular network (although in this case it’s actually Sprint’s network). As such they subsidize the cost of the hardware necessary for you to be connected to that network. City CarShare is a company in the Northern California that enables people to borrow cars. By paying monthly fees along with a small per-hour fee, members can drive shared cars whenever and wherever they choose. Though they are not without their individual downsides, both of these business models satisfy the needs of lots of us.

Why then, couldn’t the same idea be applied to listening to music? This is exactly what Kostas asks at Zune-Online: “Zune for free with a phone-like plan?” Anyone who watches the cost of computing power understands that the cost of hardware has and will always fall. In the future if a music player can be built for a low enough cost, and enough money can be made from the sale of or subscription to content, why not give the player away?

The South by Southwest conference series descends on Austin every year, and never before has the Interactive element made as much noise as the rock n’ roll kids.

As the lone evangelist to attend, David Shadle summed up it up: “If one was to pickup the internet, give it a good shake and dump it out, the result would be SXSW – the largest gathering of people influencing the way people interact with technology, media and each other.”

The highlights include Ze Frank making an Elvis-esque appearance as the Web Awards MC, leading up to the last episode of The Show. The award for our jealousy award goes to Caesar, who had the distinct privilege of playing the new Queens of The Stone Age album and shared out the single to everyone who was packing a Zune.

Twitter was at SXSW, in the sort of way that locusts were in Egypt low these many years ago. The frequency of updates to the Twitter – SXSW 2007 page, combined with the influx of new users to the social communication service, was enough to grant it phenomenon status; Friends Swap Twitters, and Frustration says the Wall Street Journal.

The official SXSW coverage site has collections of short videos and MP3s of panel discussions that will get released over the next few months. If you only listen to one of these, make it Bruce Sterling’s SXSW Rant, as you’ll always get the most enlightening opinions from a, “Visionary in Residence.”

Nick White relayed the report from Greg Amrofell of the Windows Vista team, “Some people have asked why we wanted to go to SXSW. Apart from the obvious answer (that it's the most fun you can legally have in Texas), it's really the perfect place to showcase Windows Vista and its strengths in mobility and multimedia. Whatever you create and wherever your creativity takes you, Windows Vista makes it easier and more fun.”

Wired’s blog Listening Post has a great collection of musical coverage from the week, including their picks for the Best YouTube Videos of SXSW07.