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Apple To Beat Google On Cloud Music
yogidog98 writes with this excerpt from a Reuters report:
"Apple Inc has completed work on an online music storage service and is set to launch it ahead of Google Inc, whose own music efforts have stalled, according to several people familiar with both companies' plans. Apple's plans will allow iTunes customers to store their songs on a remote server, and then access them from wherever they have an Internet connection, said two of these people who asked not to be named as the talks are still confidential."
I'm slightly interested to see what Apple does, but it's likely they'll integrate only with iOS devices and iTunes. Amazon's works with web browsers and Android devices (and I hope they release an API soon). Google will likely be the most open in terms of mobile support and maybe more likely to have an API to integrate their cloud with third party apps.
Assuming you MUST use an iOS device and MUST use iTunes as is Apple's norm. How is this going to beat more open platforms like Amazon or (I assume) Google. Especially as Android overtakes iOS in terms of users.
Once upon a time, this is also what MP3.com tried to do, but the music industry buried them.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Well, Microsoft launched their online drives that you were able to mount on any computer and synchronize among all your devices to keep local copies.
That was sometime ago that I tried, I think that what they now call skydrive (and you see product placement all over the tv series).
So the only difference is that this is Apple, and this is limited to music... for now.
It was too hard then, and even now, for the music industry to understand how much sense it made for them to catalog and pre-convert all of the audio so that all users had to do was prove they owned a CD by verifying it. It really was an efficient system, and it's too bad they were sued out of doing it.
Yup. "The cloud" is just another way to rip people off while making it more expensive to play music you ostensibly own (mobile devices increasingly come with per-megabyte limits). Why is this attractive to ANY customer? The last time I tried to buy MP3s at Amazon, I was assaulted with a hard sales pitch for their cloud services, now apparently the default for download if you don't look closely. No, never.
Dog is my co-pilot.
will take Apple down next.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
I've actually found Amazon's cloud service incredibly useful. I listen to music on a myriad of devices; my Android phone, my laptop, my desktop, my work computer.. While I typically don't rely on the cloud service to stream music (unless I'm at a machine with limited storage), it's nice to be able to download my music to all my devices when I want rather than having to manually copy them or utilize my Dropbox account (which I tend to keep full of other stuff). Any time I purchase an album on Amazonmp3 (at least once or twice a month, if I can keep myself restrained), I have it loaded onto the cloud service. Then, when I'm ready to listen to it on a certain device, I just log into my account and download the album. I'm not going to bother uploading all my previously purchased tunes (seeing as how I've got them all loaded and backed up at appropriate locations), of course, but it is nice for situations when you think you've copied an album over to another machine and delete it off of another device (such as my phone), but then discover that you didn't.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
....when Apple starts a subscription service. I don't need cloud access nor do I want to take the time to upload my collection to the net. I really don't think they'd want me uploading 200gb of hand ripped audio files, anyway. Until then, I'll just stick with listening to my own music on my mp3 player and streaming everything else via PC/cellphone with my $10/m Rhapsody account.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in order to "beat" Google, doesn't Apple actually have to have a service that's available to the public? Until then, this supposed cloud-based iWhatever is vaporware, just like Google's supposed service.
Am I the only one with half a brain on this planet? This fad of "cloud" saving has got to be the dumbest thing to emerge from the idiots who convinced people that their personal information would always be safe and then either lost it all or it was compromised by hackers. How about just keeping your damn files, information, or anything else of value OFF THE INTERNET!!!!!!! You want safety? You want to ensure your info? It's called an external drive or usb flash drive. It keeps ALL you put on it and it's within your own environment meaning you can always access it, modify it, or erase it at your own leisure. Letting someone you never met or know personally having access to your info or data is just......stupid. I never entered anything personal on the net because I'm not an idiot, companies feed off of idiots, who else buys into this failed idea.
I wondered if Apple had a leg up with the labels due to their senior status in the market, but TFA says, "Apple has yet to sign any new licenses for the service and major music labels are hoping to secure deals before the service is launched, three of the sources said."
So, Amazon, Google, and Apple are on roughly equal footing as of now. Well, perhaps Amazon has a bit more negotiating power.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
That's the exact same mentality people had when Apple released the the iPod and the iPad. It's a shame those ideas didn't take off, either.
No comment.
Really. I mean it's not like opening day of a movie based on a comic book or anything.
I want to shoot the messenger!
"Invented?" Oh and I suppose they will now patent the idea of storing music on servers so you can use it from anywhere.
When I thought of this (obvious) idea 20 years ago or so, I realized that in theory, only one copy (ok with several backups)
of each tune or movie or whatever was required to exist.
If people were to be charged money for it, each tune would just need a list of owners allowed to access it and stream it.
Then I thought. That's a pretty silly idea. People should just play a flat fee if any for access to all the content. The proceeds
could be distributed according to some kind of measurement of how much each item gets streamed. These are all obvious
ideas from a few hours of thought about the problem long ago. It's the execution, not the idea, that counts, and Apple has
execution down.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
All those songs in itunes are already stored somewhere. And Apple already has a list of songs that a user has purchased. So wouldn't Apple's "music storage cloud" basically be adding a streaming service? No real extra cloud storage required?
I'm sure the RIAA has some cockamamey restriction against a simple implementation though.
No. An online file locker is a bit different than a sync service.
Either way, both are pretty ancient ideas that are hardly revolutionary being implemented by anyone during this century.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I presume they work for a major label - that would be the only legit reason to know the plans of both companies with regard to this product. And I expect that being the case, they have a number of incentives to keep their mouth shut, not least the pack of vicious attack lawyers.
I like 7digital.com a lot. They have a pretty damn good library (in the UK at least) and have had a "Digital Locker" since sometime near the end of 2010 i think. You can stream your purchases online through a decent HTML5 player, and download as many times as you like.
Also some selected albums (eg. lastest Radiohead) have FLAC downloads for a couple of quid extra. Better than those £12.99 WAV/FLAC download prices you see everywhere else. Hopefully they start encoding more FLAC.
Wannabe nerd.
Ubuntu is not cool enough. Apple is uber-cool. If steve job farts, it is no ordinary fart - it is revolutionary, never-seen-heard-smelt-before world-changing fart which changes everything all over again!
You can use the "fast" links on dilbert.com
http://dilbert.com/fast/2011-01-07/
Much less pagecruft.
Many devices have rather limited storage.
We have reached the point where a significant amount of supplemental storage in the cloud is cheap enough and big enough that you might want to use it in order to make up for the rather limited storage available on mobile devices (especially Apple mobile devices).
My music collection can't fit on my phone. Being able to stream it to my phone is useful when compared to trying to pick and choose what subset of my music collection will go on the device itself.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
....well, they will. It will just cost you a pretty penny.
That's one big problem wit this whole "cloud" thing. It quickly becomes too expensive to be useful.
It might work with small quantities but there's a small overlap between "too big for the device" and "small enough to be cheap enough to put in the cloud".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
then the service is useless. Because cloud back-up only becomes useful when I can save my whole iPod (80gb+). Anything less is a kids toy.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Or people who care more about how well something works out of the box rather than being able to install Linux on a toaster. . .
Just wondering, since Apple makes a VERY hefty profit on marking up those models that have more memory capacity than the "basic" model of iPod/iTouch/iPad, I wonder how much they stand to lose when consumers no longer have a need to have a 32GB iAnything because it's all stored in the cloud.
Instead of charging you $100 once every 2-3 years for the higher capacity device, they charge you $10/month for 2-3 years. Do the math...
Mmm.. it's not a locker. It's a sync service. I used long time ago, but just checking I think it's called Windows Live Mesh.
When I used it, you had some online storage that you could sync, or you could leave your computer on, and remotely access it through your account. That is, you could have your files in their servers or on your computer and they would help you to remotely access them (which was particularly useful also to connect to computers connected to the internet through ISPs doing NAT).
Anyway, yes that service has been around already commercially available besides what a geek could attempt on their side.
The people who stand in line for days for those are rather pathetic as well.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Worst. Comparison. Ever!
Comic Books ^H^H Graphic Novels are important works of art and literature. The latest shiny fad from Apple is nothing but twaddle, which only fools and sheeple will waste their time on.
I'd mark this +1 if I were for certain it is sarcastic. But since I think you might be serious...
What is this strange obsession with more restrictive, controlled, and less flexible things that people seem to have?
It's called "ease-of-use", which Apple is pretty good at. It also works well for complex things like cars.
I'm sure they'll let you store as much as you want....as long as you bought it from the iTunes store. That wouldn't be an unfair demand, would it?
Yup. What you are describing is more like Ubuntu One.
What Apple seems to be releasing is more along the lines of the service that Amazon has already done.
Amazon beat both Apple and Google to the punch.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I try not to join in the Apple supporting around here, but i remember my 1st gen iPod fondly, and when other people saw and used it, I don't remember them recoiling as if I'd handed them a steaming piece of shit.
I'm sure your zune/rio/whatever is pants. Everybody's got one, remember?
Ocean is land, covered with water.
Agreed. To me, Amazon Cloud wasn't so much an iTunes or Google Music killer. It's a Pandora killer. I generally was buying my music through Amazon or from my own CD collection anyway. Amazon Cloud lets me listen to my own collection rather than relying on Pandora's sometimes off the mark impression of what I want to listen to.