Great new updates to AOL’s Winamp: Features an all-new plug-in that plays YouTube videos

Winamp, AOL’s industry leading media player, celebrated its 10 year anniversary in 2007. Today it has morphed from a basic media player to the most popular media player in the world. Some of its features allows users to manage and play audio and video files, rip and burn CDs, enjoy free music and access and share music.

“Our aim is to ensure that Winamp keeps pace with changing technology. The best aspect of Winamp is that it is totally customizable and hence millions of developers have had the opportunity to create customized enhancements for the media player with the help of a Wiki for online collaboration of developers as well as a developer website ( http://dev.winamp.com) . This ensures that we always provide our users with the best and most recent updates to the player – making Winamp a true global product”, says Scott Levin, Vice President AOL, and GM of Winamp

The most recent update to the player is a plug-in that has been created by an Indian developer, Sanchit Bhatnagar. Called MiniTube, this plays related videos from YouTube while the user is listening to his favourite songs on Winamp. Updates to the MiniTube such as full screen videos and video downloads are also on their way!

AOL has also launched ‘now playing’ on Winamp which gives users information on artists – songs, photos, videos, biography and related radio stations. Users can now listen to songs as well as buy them online.

Some other recent updates by AOL to Winamp include a support that has been added to allow users to share their media library to their gaming consoles on the same network through Winamp Remote. This was created through a partnership with Orb. The same extension allows users to access their media library anywhere with an internet connection.

About Winamp:
Winamp has close to 76 million unique visitors* to the site every month. It is easy to use with a skinnable interface and customizable with a vast number of plug-ins; the player supports a wide range of file formats and plays streaming video and audio content.
Besides MP3, Winamp supports a very wide variety of contemporary and specialized music file formats, including MIDI, MOD, MPEG-1, WAV and Windows Media Audio. In addition, Winamp can play and import music from audio CDs, optionally with CD-Text, and can also burn music to CDs. Winamp supports many types of streaming media. Its unique SHOUTcast technology provides free access to Internet radio and Internet television. Winamp was also featured in PC World as one the best freebies available on the Internet (http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,5556-page,1-c,mp3/description.html
The Development team of AOL in Bangalore has contributed significantly to the development, product management and design aspects of Winamp.

Winamp is now available to users in India as a free downloadable version! Just go to http://in.winamp.com/ or www.aol.in

For further information
Anand Baskaran/Payal Banerjee

9845028508/9845175351

anand.baskaran {at} corp.aol(.)com / payal.banerjee {at} corp.aol(.)com
* Comscore