LAS VEGAS - Dutch electronics group Philips is to partner digital media company RealNetworks in online music in a move to bolster its position in North America and help revive RealNetworks' music business.
Philips and RealNetworks will offer a unified music download service to home audio systems as well as portable music players from a single provider, filling what they argue is a gap in the market.
The two companies plan to launch the Rhapsody service for Philips devices in North America around the end of the first quarter, executives said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Sunday.
They said they had learned from Apple's winning combination of the hit iPod music player and the iTunes online music store that has made Apple by far the market leader, while offering consumers more by bypassing the PC for music at home.
"You need very tight device-service combinations, and Apple has proven this," RealNetworks' head of consumer business development, Matt Rowlen, told Reuters in an interview.
Customers will need either a Philips home audio system or a box to attach to their existing system to have music they select from the Rhapsody subscription service downloaded simultaneously to their PC and home stereo.
The Philips MP3 music players that will make up the full set will be priced "very aggressively" at about $109 to $199 for 4 gigabyte or 8 GB versions, Philips Consumer Lifestyle strategy chief Kevin Lewis told Reuters. This is enough for up to about 2,000 songs.