I use SONOS at home.

Using the sonos ipad app, choosing spotify, you see all the artworks / covers...

Ralf

The Beo6 has to receive the Album cover & title from the BM5. The B&O application on the BM5 has to extract and render that info from the HD for locally stored files & similarly render the Album artwork & title from Spotify onto the BS5. It sounds as though you are suggesting that Spotify is running as a separate application on the BM5 and is communicating directly with the BS5. If that is the case then I could believe that it would be impossible to display the artwork on the Beo6, if that is not the case then I cannot see any technical problem other than software development to rendering to the Beo6. At the end of the day if it can already be displayed on the BS5 then why can it not be displayed on the Beo6. Displaying the artwork on the Beo6 is the one of the primary functional advantages over the Beo5.

@rmclachlan- now that is a valid point, let hope Struer is seeing this !

Peter

I received a reply from BeoCare, no great surprise as to the content. Very polite and helpful but depressingly familiar...

Dear Mr xxx

stefan wrote:

Not exactly. I had hoped that you could explain your post a bit further:

"Well, I know that specifically in the case of transmitting Spotify covers special agreements would have to be made with the copyright-holders of each label."

Obviously you can`t.

Usually Beo would make an agreement with Spotify. Spotify has agreements with music labels, artists, etc.

So,  if Beo made agreements with Spotify that exclude coverart sent by Beoremotes, this was a big mistake.

I can`t believe that. You, as a dealer, should know that....

So, please explain, what "exactly" is the problem?

Stefan 

Well, I could elaborate on it, but what does it help? Specific agreements would have to be made with Spotify. I assume that B&O didn't make these agreements or did not want to make these agreements for reasons that I touched upon initially: don't expect any big developments for Beo5/6 anymore.

Please elaborate. It might not help but I am great believer in understanding a problem before accepting whether there is a solution or not.

Any insight on whether there will another controller to replace the Beo6? My view is that they really need one, and one that is considerably easier to program and can be prgrammed by the end user.

rmclachlan wrote:

Please elaborate. It might not help but I am great believer in understanding a problem before accepting whether there is a solution or not.

Any insight on whether there will another controller to replace the Beo6? My view is that they really need one, and one that is considerably easier to program and can be prgrammed by the end user.

Well, I cannot go into all the details, but there are several things in this that make 2-way support for Spotify on Beo6 a bad business case. First of all it is the licensing. Spotify wants to have money per device accessing their service for album covers etc. For such devices they normally request to have their own client on the device OR they have specific requirements towards branding and functionality. All things that would require money, development and are partly not feasible on the hardware.
Those people suggesting that you would just have to transmit covers from a device like BM5/BS5 I have to tell that Spotify does not allow this per se. New, very specific (expensive) agreements would have to be made and this normally does not go without any branding/functionality requests from Spotify as mentioned above.

So the big question for B&O would be: Is it really worth investing that much money into a device (Beo6) that is already beyond its best days?

I have no idea what is planned in terms of new remotes, but from what I understand the BeoRemote app is the way to go for them in the future.

OK, I think that is a fair reply. Hopefully B&O will be forthcoming with a better controller for their flagship audio product - no matter how it is done.