Nokia Faces Gaming, Music Gaffes

Nokia's Internet content business took two blows to the chin today: Warner pulled its music from Nokia's online store, and the company has delayed its N-Gage gaming service.

Finland’s Nokia might be the world’s largest maker of mobile handsets, but the company has been eager to expand its presence into the Internet services arena—particularly when those services are latched to its mobile devices. However, the company’s online efforts to a one-two punch today, as Nokia was forced to delay the launch of its N-Gage gaming service, and Warner Music pulls songs from Nokia’s music store over piracy fears.

The music store and revived gaming services are components of Nokia’s new Ovi brand of Internet services, which Nokia announced in August. The Nokia Music Tore offers both pay-to-download and music streaming services for Windows Media-enabled PCS and devices; the revamped N-Gage gaming service was set to offer multiplayer games to owners of N-Gage-enabled mobile devices, like Nokia’s S60 smartphones. N-Gage’s offerings are tailored to casual gamers. Both services were to debut in November.

Now, Nokia is pushing back the debut of the N-Gage service until December, claiming software testing is taking longer than expected. And although Nokia opened its first music store in the UK this week, Warner Music Group has pulled its music off the service, citing piracy concerns related to Nokia’s file-sharing site Mosh. Nokia says it uses audio fingerprint technology from Audible Magic to prevent copyrighted content from being distributed via Mosh, but that apparently wasn’t good enough for Warner Music. The Nokia Music Store still offers more than 2 million tracks from other music distributors, and Nokia is moving ahead with plans to launch stores in France, Germany, and Spain.