Rich Tehrani has a very interesting inteview with Andrew Sviridenko of Spirit DSP, where Andrew positions Spirit DSP as a more robust solution than Global IP Sound (GIPS) due to Spirit DSP's better multipoint conferencing support and scalability. The GIPS codec/voice engine is used in Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, and a few other VoIP softphones. Interestingly, Andrew mentions speaking with Microsoft, so if Spirit DSP were to be embedded in a future release of Windows Live Messenger, that would be a huge win for Spirit DSP. How awesome would it be if both of us in a conversation could share one playlist, to which we could add or remove tracks, skip to the next song, or reshuffle? It’d be like we are at the same dance party, except we could actually dance because no one would be there to make fun of
And speaking of Windows Live Messenger, Microsoft's bloggers have been covering the beta of this software and "leaking" some of the really cool features in Windows Live Messenger, including a really neat feature that lets you share your music playlist over the Internet. In fact, one of the Microsoft bloggers, Leah, has an interesting birthday wish:
"For my
birthday, I wanted a way to play 
music on my computer and then invite my buddies to listen with me on his/her computer.
us!...Unless we add webcam of course 
"
Anyway, she also details the feature-list for the streaming music playlist sharing, the most important of which states, "Remember - you’re sharing a play list. If you fastforward, skip, or stop a song, your buddy will hear the same thing you do." Hmmm, only 2 party peer-to-peer music sharing? This got me thinking. If Spirit DSP is great at multipoint VoIP conferencing, their technology could also be used for multipoint P2P music sharing. Of course once the RIAA gets wind of this feature they'll probably sue teenagers for sharing/streaming their favorite music to multiple members in their buddy list. :@
Check out this excerpt from the interview Rich had with Spirit DSP:
Global IP Sound or GIPS is their only competitor as of today and others will emerge according to Andrew... "Possibly Microsoft," he says. They are speaking with Microsoft about using Spirit's technology. According to Andrew, Global IP sound positioned themselves as a company developing a voice engine and he feels that GIPS is focused on softphone vendors and voice over IM vendors.
"Their deployment with Skype made GIPS popular," he says. He doesn't think GIPS has a strong future as they don't have the resources to move into voice in a full-blown way. He continues saying that Spirit has been preparing for the past few years knowing that multipoint conferencing is the future. They see that global players are moving in this direction as well.
Wow, the bold part above hit me like a ton of bricks since I've been a huge fan of GIPS since I did the first exclusive review of GIPS on a PocketPC back in 2003. Definitely worth checking out Rich's full article.
