AOL Media Player

» see player.aol.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i was on winamp in 2005. aol media player was one of those things you knew existed from tech blogs but never installed, not on a ttnet adsl connection in ankara and not without an aol account. nullsoft was still the app everyone actually opened. amp shipped its public beta on 13 april 2005. aol had been rewriting the code for three years by that point according to the client group's own quotes, and the playback engine was a fork of the winamp core under the codename unagi.

aol owned nullsoft and aol also owned the communicator client framework going back to the aim era. either way, the aol media player was the attempt to fold all of that into a single mainstream consumer product that could compete with windows media player and itunes on the same desktop. still. the pitch was cd ripping in mpeg4 aac or wma alongside a media library with metadata browsing, plus integration with the aol music service on the back end.

still. the whole run of the beta happened in the us market only, gated behind an aol account. the reviews at the time were mixed. the winamp community treated the amp launch as an insult, and the codebase was heavier than the winamp classic build. seven months later aol pulled the plug and told beta users the standalone client was going away.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

still. amp was built on top of aol's communicator client framework, which was the same skinning system aol was using across its email client and its instant messenger. the unagi playback engine came out of nullsoft. anyway, the amp team had been going through rewrites since roughly 2002, with the shape of the product shifting from a winamp replacement into a mainstream media hub as itunes started dominating.

the april 2005 beta shipped with a video library alongside audio ripping and playlist tools that leaned toward the itunes model. subscription integration with the aol music service was the differentiator, you could stream from an aol radio station or open a library track inside the same client. the interface tried to look modern next to itunes 4 and windows media player 10 and neither audience really moved.

~ what really happened ~

this part was covered in betanews and slashdot at the time. anyway, on 20 december 2005 aol posted the notice that the amp beta was over. no consumer release was coming, the standalone client was being wound down, the aol music side would move onto a subscription-store product called aol music now that had been assembled from the circuit city musicnow acquisition earlier in the year.

beta testers got told their installs would keep working for a while but no updates were coming. some parts of the unagi engine and the playlist ui migrated into aol.com's web-based media player, which stayed live for a few years after the desktop kill. the pieces that did not make it into the web version just fell off the roadmap.

~ the long tail ~

this part you had to be following the nullsoft team for. anyway, winamp itself outlived amp by eight full years, aol finally killed the nullsoft brand on 20 december 2013 (a december 20 date exactly eight years after the amp obit, purely by accident). in fairness, radionomy rescued the winamp assets in january 2014, so the brand kept going even after aol was done with it.

aol music now went the other direction. samsung, sorry, napster bought the aol music now subscriber list for $15 million in january 2007 (roughly). that was the end of the aol client group's ambition to run its own music platform. amp was the moment aol tried to do what apple was already doing with itunes, and the moment aol figured out it could not.

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