Meet the new Scour, not the same as the old Scour. Four months after it bought the much-beleaguered (and heavily sued) Scour and its Scour Exchange (SX) file-sharing platform, CenterSpan has relaunched SX, as promised, as a legal, secure file-sharing service. Sort of.
After months of pronouncements that a test version of SX would launch in March, the product did in fact roll out on March 26 - as a controlled beta not yet open to the general public, including the 300,000 or so people who CenterSpan had registered for the beta on the old Scour site. (It's now up to 400,000.) However, CEO Frank Hausmann said at the time that there's a good reason for that - they want to make sure their network and the software can support such a massive undertaking.
"We seem to be growing at about a little more than 5,000 registrations a day," he said. "There is no question that there is a growing percentage of daily registered users that are otherwise, heretofore, not registered Scour users," though he declined to say exactly what that percentage might be. In any event, Hausmann said at that time that the public beta would launch in seven to 10 days, after the control group tests the system's limits. Approximately 70 percent of those registered for the beta are on broadband connections. As opposed to the old Scour, the new Scour carries only content that is fully licensed by its owners and wrapped in digital rights management software allowing its distribution and use to be controlled.
Now, almost two-and-a-half weeks later, the beta is finally ready to launch to the public - but again, only sort of. The public beta launched Thursday, but it will not be thrown fully open; instead, it will be opened chunks at a time, on a first-come, first-serve basis, over a matter of weeks. The company argues that to throw the floodgates wide open, as it were, could overly tax the system at a time when it is still trying to prove itself.
The beta is launching with about 15,000 total files available, eventually ramping up to about 100,000. Most of that content is admittedly second-rate; a number of the musical artists represented on the beta are unknown or little known, and the video content is limited to mostly movie trailers.
The software is straightforward in its use. It is almost entirely Web-based; the only download is a small meter that shows what files are in transit and how far along in the download process they are, much like the Transfer window in Napster. As opposed to Napster, though, Scour does not present the user with a list of file locations with their connection type and relative distance; CenterSpan's servers will, for each request, determine the best download available to the user and initiate it automatically.
The Web interface looks much like the old Scour in terms of color scheme, fonts and, to some extent, layout. However, CenterSpan officials say that what users see is only Scour on face and that all the peer-to-peer and digital rights management guts are in fact CenterSpan's C-Star platform. At the time CenterSpan bought Scour, Hausmann said the purchase was not necessary and that he wanted Scour more than anything else for its user base and developed interface. That interface now includes one banner ad in the middle of the screen; there are no plans for other ad forms, such as pop-ups.
The program search engine allows for search by keyword, title, artist and album and also allows searches for individual users, for purposes of exploring other people's libraries. Files that have already been downloaded can be launched through a "My Files" tab on the Web interface. All files are encoded in Windows Media 7, and as of now, the new Scour will only work on Windows machines. The company does plan to build a Mac version
