Many year ago I heard about a rival music distribution system to iTunes and I didn’t need much convincing that this could be a better way to buy and listen to music on my PC. I did research into Zune and immediately loved the look of the brand and its logo (not so much the devices though, brown?!). In fact I so liked the logo and idea for the service I even bought a Zune poster from eBay, it featured the text comingzune.com/.
Since then Zune has added some great features such as instant streaming of music and films to the PC or TV and radically changed the look of their devices. Despite not being deemed by many as a competitor to Apple’s entertainment system it most certainly is the best competitor.
However, living in the UK much of the Zune functionality has always been out of my grasp and its only been in the last year that there has been any real movement to bringing Zune to the UK with movie rentals on the Xbox 360. This is set to change very soon though.
Yesterday Microsoft made public its plans for making Zune an international service. There is good and bad news for many countries however for me and my neighbours around the UK and those in France its very good news as we will be getting the whole Zune package. You can see which countries will be receiving the different parts of the Zune service in the useful table below from thenextweb.com.
The Zune Pass will cost £8.99 in the UK and €9.99 across Europe (where its supported). Microsoft will soon release a new version of the Zune PC Software, version 4.7, for people in all the countries listed above bringing many new features to any users who have previously used the software in their country. It will also be possible to buy or rent a song or film on any platform, PC, TV or mobile (Zune HD and Windows Phone 7), and play it back on a different platform. Its even possible to listen to music via Zune.net on any browser.
A few things to note with Zune going international is that there wont be the 10 free songs with the Zune Pass which people in the US currently enjoy. If people want to access their catalogue of music and programs across the three different screens and the cloud then the same Windows Live ID needs to be used on each system (including the same ID for one’s Xbox Live subscription).
You can read the press release from Microsoft here.
I am very excited that finally Zune in the UK is coming Zune.
