New Online Service/Resource: Freegal!

Hello:

We are going to unveil a new digital music service mid-March called Freegal.  Hopefully you have all had a chance to become familiar with Hoopla.  If you read my e-mails or have attended the Hoopla Training one thing that was mentioned is that Hoopla does not carry the Sony music catalog. The Sony catalog represents at least 40% of the music publishing industry. The new service, Freegal, is the service that provides Sony music.  However, it does not work like Hoopla so there will be new things to learn.  Freegal has two features. First, anyone with a valid library card will be able to download 3 Freegal songs per week. The difference from Hoopla is that the downloads from Freegal are individual songs, not albums, and the customers keep the downloads.  Their access never expires. The second part of Freegal is that the customer is allowed 3 hours of streaming music per day. The service is not necessarily more complicated than Hoopla, but it is different.

To help prepare for the new service there will be a webinar presented twice on March 5^th  at 9:00 am and again at 11:00 am. The invite with the links will be sent in the next couple of days. The webinar will also be recorded and put on the Training Portal. We are also working on other videos, etc., that we can supply through e-mail or post on the Training Portal.

Sincerely,

Marianne Lorio

Multimedia Specialist

Hoopla! New Digital Media Service

Hello, Team,

We are now offering a new service called Hoopla that allows for customers to stream videos, music and more. Please visit the link to the Training Portal for more information and review Marianne Lorio's email message below.

Thank you,
-Marcos M.

Link to Training: https://sites.google.com/site/hplstafftraining/learningresources/libraryfunctions/hoopla

Email message from Marianne Lorio:

Hello:

 

We are getting ready to launch a new digital media service for the public. It is called hoopla and will include streaming and downloadable movies, TV shows, audiobooks and music. Before you get too excited about the video I should let you know that it includes mainly older, non-blockbuster movies and nonfiction TV shows. The studios are still hesitant to work with public libraries so this is an experiment to see if this model will work for studios and libraries alike. Whether eventually we will be allowed to provide access to the more popular titles remains to be seen. The music studios, however, are very excited about the new model and all the major studios except for Sony are providing full catalogs. This means you can get current Billboard hits to checkout. Checkout periods for video is 72 hours, music is 7 days and audiobooks is 21 days. After that time period the customer will no longer have access to the title and any download will be “returned”.

 

We will start by offering customers 4 check outs, regardless of format, per a month. To understand why we are offering so few check outs, you have to know a bit about the hoopla model. Hoopla charges the library per check out. Prices range from $0.99 to $2.99 per title. We have set money aside for hoopla for the rest of the fiscal year and don’t want to go through all the hoopla deposit early on. Hopefully once we have been doing this for a few months we will get a better feel for the usage and be able to adjust the number of check outs accordingly.

 

We are planning to do a “soft” launch of hoopla next week. This means that we will put it on the website for customers to use, but won’t advertise it. Beginning of January we will start promoting the service among our customers. This week I would like you to explore hoopla and try using one of your check outs. The hoopla website is www.hoopladigital.com. You will need your library card to sign up and get started. While it would be nice for you to plunge straight into hoopla as the library customers will do, there is a hoopla webpage on the Staff Training Portal. The direct URL to the website is https://sites.google.com/site/hplstafftraining/learningresources/libraryfunctions/hoopla.  There are basic instructions, videos and FAQs. The webpage, especially the FAQs, are a work in progress so please be patient with us as we finish.

 

Sincerely,

 

Marianne Lorio

Multimedia Specialist

Houston Public Library

marianne.lorio@houstontx.gov

832-393-1514