Pandora Removes Music Listening Cap after Relaunches Site in HTML5

Pandora, the customized Internet radio streaming service, has pushed out a redesigned interface to all users. The new UI comes with an added bonus: the company has removed its infamous 40 hour listening cap, enabling users to streaming an unlimited amount of music for free.
The Web interface for the popular music service has been totally overhauled, offering a sleeker, cleaner design with simplified controls. The top of the page contains iTunes-esque controls for playing, pausing and skipping songs, as well as voting them up or down. From the same toolbar, users can type in the name of any artist, composer or song to automatically generate a radio station based on their musical preferences.

The site's player new player was built using HTML5 and JavaScript, rather than relying on Flash for playback. If this change was made as part of a tablet-friendly strategy, that strategy must still be under development. We tried loading the new Pandora from our iPad, but were still redirected to a page prompting us to download the native iOS app.
Pandora also has new social and sharing features on the way. The service will soon be rolling out a Twitter-style feed of recent music-listening activity from friends to serve as "a centralized place to find, like and comment on what friends and like-minded listeners are discovering and enjoying on Pandora." With this update, stations finally get their own dedicated URL, which makes it easier for users to share stations with each other.
Until today, Pandora had a 40-hour monthly listening cap in place as a way to keep artist royalty payment costs under control. That cap has been lifted, but the service still limits the number of times you can skip songs within a given station, due to licensing restrictions.


 source 1

Share this post