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- Muziic is a media player, FLV encoder and related website, designed to directly access flash video media files from YouTube, without the user having to visit the file's display page on the YouTube website. Muziic can also refer to the organization that created and maintains the project. As the name indicates, the primary focus of Muziic is on accessing YouTube's music resources. Muziic was created by 16-year-old David Nelson and his father Mark Nelson. David was responsible for the software development, and Mark organized the project as a company. After a year of development, the pair set up a website, www. muziic. com, which launched on February 25, 2009, and debuted the Muziic Player software (version 1. x). Since its launch, the Muziic website has experienced rapid growth in its online traffic, to the point where the site has become inaccessible at times. The Nelsons are reported as having had to add additional servers, to keep up with demand. The software is able to search, sort, play, and create playlists of YouTube videos. It also has an upload function; allowing users to encode media files as flash video, and add them to YouTube. Currently, the Muziic Player is available only for the Windows operating system (XP and Vista), and is dependant on the Flash Player plug-in for Internet Explorer. The Muziic website provides a degree of "social networking" functionality for Muziic users as well, including a community generated directory of YouTube videos, playlists, and channels. Muziic also maintains its own YouTube channel, and has a presence on Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter. The release of Muziic Player version 1, and the related services provided by the Muziic website, have generated a degree of interest and attention in the online IT community. A number of computer-technology and music-related online news services, and bloggers, have covered the story, and the discussion of various aspects of it. The focus of the coverage has included the Muziic Player and service, the Nelsons, particularly David, because of his youth and central role in creating the software, and the reactions of YouTube, its parent company, Google, and the recording industry. The way in which the Muziic Player accesses Youtube videos, bypassing the other contents of the webpages on which those videos would normally be displayed, raised questions about the acceptability of Muziic to YouTube/Google; both in terms of the legality, and the practical business aspects, of the service. It also potentially complicates YouTube's relationship with the recording industry, and the agreements that YouTube/Google has reached with a number of record companies. YouTube does allow its videos to be streamed offsite, subject to certain conditions; and YouTube and Google are developing further aspects of their online video service, including experiments with the insertion of commercial advertisements into videos, and various ways of accessing and organizing content. It was not clear, however, what their reaction would be to third-party developers such as the Nelsons, and their Muziic project. The Nelsons state that they had attempted to contact Youtube/Google prior to the launch of the Muziic website, and received no response. On March 17, 2009, CNET reported that YouTube and the Nelsons had reached an agreement to allow the Muziic service to continue to operate, and David Nelson was working on minor adjustments to the Muziic Player, in order to meet the requirements of the YouTube API terms. The primary change required seems to have involved increasing the size of the player's video screen, which had previously been "postage-stamp sized"; as the emphasis of Muziic is on accessing YouTube as a music resource.
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