Winamp is still alive and kicking 10 days past the December 20 deadline and its seems that either AOL is forgotten to flip the kill switch or it isn’t bothered about the player any more or it may have found a saviour who will take on the reigns of the multimedia player.
AOL announced last month that it will be pulling the plug on Winamp on December 20 and users should download the latest version of the player if they wish to use it past the deadline.
“Winamp.com and associated web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date”, AOL said at the time.
However, just a couple of days after the announcement reports emerged that Microsoft was looking to buy Winamp and Shoutcast Media streaming service from AOL. The reports were not supported by any evidence or leaks. However, as the player has managed to live on past its deadline, we are inclined to believe that something is brewing behind closed doors at AOL.
In our survey, we asked whether Microsoft should buy Winamp and 21.6 percent of our readers replied with an affirmation, while 20.1 percent said no. Just under 30 percent said that they don’t use Winamp and the rest didn’t like the idea at all.
Love winamp and shoutcast. I started using it only recently even though I have heard of it long back. It would be sad if Aol just shuts it down. I have been an avid listener of Aol radio 2 years back but gradually stopped using I, now they closed it down and winamp is also heading that way.
AOL takes a while to flip the kill-switch. When they shut down a bunch of their pop-culture sites back in March, both the ones that were well and truly dead (like Spinner) and the ones that had been sold at the last minute but were still in silent transition to the new owner (like Comics Alliance) hung around in stasis for a month or more.
I heard that Winamp.com still makes money for AOL, in the low millions. Why shut it down?
Because you likely heard wrong?
If it dies I’ll try Clementine, or any of a dozen other freeware options. I’d prefer to keep using Winamp, especially on my mobiles, but it’s not the only Llama out there.