Posted by The Blogging Desk on Wed, Apr 06, 2011
Amazon:
Amazon Cloud Drive is your hard drive in the cloud. Store your music, videos, photos, and documents on Amazon's secure servers. All you need is a web browser to upload, download, and access your files from any computer. Get more details about using Cloud Drive
Your Cloud Drive comes with 5 GB of free storage—enough space to store up to 1000 songs. This space is yours to use as you like and you will never be charged for it.
Use your Amazon Cloud Drive as the go-to location for all your important files. At work, at home, during your commute or while on vacation—you'll always have access to everything you've uploaded to your Cloud Drive through your Amazon account.
Both Apple and Google have been flirting with the idea for some time to allow for storage and streaming in a way that it out-of-mind for the consumer. It looks like Amazon beat them both to the punch, however.
If you're a Dropbox user, you'd find Amazon's service familiar but with a few choice differences. For me, the big dealbreaker is that Amazon Cloud Player has no iOS app. In fact, when you load the website for Cloud Player inside of Mobile Safari, it suggest that you use Internet Explorer. Burn.
Also, there is no desktop version of Cloud Player. As a heavy Dropbox user myself, the ability to drag and drop files into Dropbox folders is a huge reason for using their services. The Dropbox website is a nice Plan B. However, the Cloud Drive website is Plan A, as there is no desktop version of the app.
The Cloud Drive pricing is very appealing, though. 5GB free as opposed to Dropbox's 2GB free per month. And if/when you buy an album from Amazon, it automatically upgrades you to 20GB/per month free for a year. Not too shabby. That's a big difference w/ Dropbox. Many people use Amazon to buy and rent movies as well as purchase music and services. It may be a perfect fit for most folks.
You're not able to share folders, however. This is another great reason to have Dropbox. You can share multiple folders with family and friends or ever co-workers. My wife and I share a folder for our son's pictures. Whenever we snap a new picture of him on our iPhones, we'll upload them to his Dropbox folder to share them with each other. Also, it's the ultimate backup for those photos.
In terms of streaming media, Amazon has definately beaten Apple and their iTunes service to the punch. But will the consumer be able to see through the famous Apple Reality Distortion Field when iTunes streaming is announced?
Posted by The Blogging Desk on Mon, Mar 07, 2011
No matter what tech blog you look at, there is usually an article about the new Data Center Apple has said they’d be using for MobileMe and iTunes. Said article inevitably leads to drool-worthy comments about a streaming iTunes. But how would Apple do that with your purchased content? How would they do it with your own “ripped” content?
In iOS 4.3, I think Apple tips its hat with “Home Sharing”. Home Sharing has been inside of iTunes on your desktop for sometime but I’m not sure how many people actually use it. For those out of the know, once you enable Home Sharing on your main desktop that houses your media, you can then use other computers on your network to to access that content inside of their own iTunes.
Home Sharing in iOS 4.3 will allow you to share your iTunes content from your main computer to your iOS devices seemlessly over your home network. It’s very smooth. Is that NDA?
[REDACTED] is very smooth.
When inside of iTunes.app, you have the ability to switch your iTunes Home Sharing Library. This change is seemless and the media now shows inside of the app as if it were stored locally. When you leave that WiFi network, things revert back to the local storage, and the ability to view the Home Sharing networked Library goes away.
This is exactly how I envision Apple to enable iTunes streaming of your own content via MobileMe, or whatever they decide to brand it. Apple has made Back To My Mac, and Screen Sharing a seemless experience. Couldn’t they use this technology to stream your media in the same fashion across networks other than your own?
What about purchased content that you maybe don’t have downloaded inside of your home iTunes Library? I think this is where the data center will come into play. Home Sharing uses your AppleID - in my case, also my MobileMe account - in order to stream your own media to your iOS device. Your iTunes purchases are also used with these credentials.
I think that Apple will use the data center coupled with your AppleID credentials in order to stream your purchased content to your iOS device. Home Sharing seems to pave the way for the local media and I really think the data center will work on streaming your non-hosted content.
Of course, this would most likely be all behind the scenes to iOS users. It would just “work”. Let’s get cracking, iOS 5. While Trigon employee don't wear mock turtlenecks, we do work with data centers of our own for our great clients. Contact us today to see how we can help you out as well!
Posted by Matt Kolowski on Tue, Jul 06, 2010
Would you want your iTunes in the Cloud? Put the Cheezy Poofs down for a second and pause last weeks True Blood, you loser.
What does that even mean, anyway: In the Cloud?
I just downloaded the Last.fm iPhone app which has been updated to work with the new iOS 4 features. Meaning it can now stream audio in the background. OMGCOOL! Last.fm is very cool in that there is a small app that will “scrobble” your collection as you listen to it inside of iTunes. It will then know what is in your library, and shoot it up to your Last.fm account. So now, when I pop open the iPhone app and select “My Library” it will wirelessly play songs that are also in my iTunes library right on my iPhone. Very cool. But if you want it to “just work” and be completely lazy it’s not very cool at all. (note: It’s also cool in discovering new music, or something.)
So what IF iTunes knew what songs you had ripped from CDs and purchased and threw into your own library. Let’s say you fire up your iPod app on your iPhone or iPad but you haven’t transferred any songs or video to the phone, yet. Wouldn’t it be cool if the app would automatically know what music you have on your laptop? Songs would appear in the app just as if you had sync’d them. Click on a song, 2 seconds later it would play. I can dig it.
Since you use your iTunes account sign in for pretty much everything you do on an iPhone and inside of iTunes, one would think this kind of syncing would be relatively simple to maintain for Apple. One would also think this would allow for wireless App syncing from the iTunes store on your Mac, right to your iPhone or iPad. Download Doodle Jump on an iPad and it could automatically start download on your other iOS devices. The same would go for songs, podcasts and maybe even videos. Why not? It’s all using the same iTunes account info.
On the XBOX 360, Microsoft uses similar streaming capabilities on their Zune Marketplace nowadays. You can choose to download or stream a movie you rent. Less HDD space taken away from you. If I had to choose to download an HD movie to my iPad or just stream it right away, I’m not sure why on earth I would want to download the entire thing. Well, maybe if I was going somewhere without WiFi. But if I was home snuggled in bed with some pepperoni & cheese, why not choose the streaming option?
This obviously would be huge for a possible iTunes.com website where you could stream your entire library over the web to another computer, too. And also that Apple TV thing. But without iOS on an Apple TV, I doubt anyone gives two hoots about it.
Just not yet, anyway.