MusicGiants executive Brent Baum says Seagate FreeAgent Pro drives help speed the delivery of audio and video content to consumers.

Most consumers are happy with the audio quality they get from the digital songs they download and play on their iPods and other music players. Those consumers don't know what they're missing.

MusicGiants, with help from Seagate, is delivering high-definition digital music that's up to seven times better than the sound quality of any other music download service. The Nevada-based company uses Seagate 750-GB FreeAgent™ Pro external storage solutions to get that premium content to their customers.

MusicGiants delivers bundled music packages—hundreds of songs—to over 600 authorized U.S. dealers who install home-entertainment systems for end-users. MusicGiants offers richer sound quality because its digitized music is played over media servers, without the MP3 compression required for playing on portable music devices with limited storage capacity.

"We want to deliver music in its original fidelity, as the artists originally intended," said Brent Baum, chief operating officer at MusicGiants. "We needed a storage solution to get that music to our home-entertainment installers in the most efficient way possible."

MusicGiants can load "tons of music" onto a FreeAgent Pro drive, which means its entertainment installation partners don’t have to spend several hours loading that content from CDs, Baum explained.

But that's just the first step in this partnership. In January during the International Consumer Electronics Show, the company announced the first-ever HDD-based distribution deal with Paramount Pictures.

Through its new VideoGiants service, MusicGiants will use Seagate drives to deliver bundled high-quality film packages from the studio's digital library, including Braveheart, Mission Impossible and hundreds of other Paramount titles. The films will also be available individually via direct download onto any compatible media server through the MusicGiants integrated HD Media Store.

As part of its partnership with Seagate, MusicGiants is also working with new Seagate Pipeline HD™ hard drives for the fast-growing digital media center market. The drives, which begin shipping in the second quarter, offer up to 1 TB of storage capacity—enough to capture up to 200 hours of high-definition TV programming or 1,000 hours of standard TV. The Pipeline HD drives are also energy efficient, consuming nearly a third less power than previous Seagate drives for DVRs, and will be the industry's quietest drives for digital media centers—an important new market for both Seagate and MusicGiants.

"Seagate's commitment to reliable, high-performance storage was a natural fit for us," said MusicGiants CEO Scott Bahneman. "Our customers have made substantial investments in their home theater systems and they expect the highest quality from MusicGiants when it comes to the purchase and delivery of their HD content."

"MusicGiants is a great example of how Seagate is ramping up partnerships in the consumer solutions market," said Pat King, SVP of sales and marketing for Seagate's Consumer Solutions Division. "It's a high-definition world, and consumers are growing tired of compromising the quality of their entertainment. We want to be the storage leader in the fast-growing market for high-quality photos, high-fidelity music, and high-definition video."

King added that consumers are "hungry to solve the pain" of storing and managing digital content.

"We have a great start with our internal and external storage solutions, and partnering with MusicGiants is another step in this direction," he said.