14 DAY TRIAL // The famous media player Winamp developed by Nullsoft and owned by AOL will live on, as Belgium radio service Radionomy has reached an agreement with the parent company to take over the media player and the adjacent services.
TechCrunch is reporting that Radionomy, who has more than 6,000 radio stations in its portfolio, and AOL, the current owner of Winamp who originally planned to shut it down by December 20, 2013, are supposed to finalize the deal by the end of the week.
Neither AOL nor Radionomy issued official comments on this, but Winamp forum members have reportedly spotted that Winamp’s nameservers have been quietly transferred to Radionomy, which means that an agreement may already be in place.
At the time of writing this article, the Winamp retirement announcement is still there on the official website of the media player.
“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. See release notes for latest improvements to this last release. Thanks for supporting the Winamp community for over 15 years,” the announcement reads.
According to some previous reports, Microsoft itself was interested in purchasing Winamp, even though it was a bit surprising given the fact that Redmond continues to invest a fortune in Windows Media Player and Xbox Music.
Of course, don’t take this report for granted, but given the fact that Winamp nameservers have already been transferred to Radionomy, expect an announcement to be released in just a few hours.
The Shoutcast streaming service is also said to be part of the deal, along with its 50,000+ radio stations and the official forums, skin repository, and other adjacent services.