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Wednesday, March 30, 2011
How Amazon beat Google and Apple to the Music Cloud
Hey everyone, just a heads up this is my blog posting for Tuesday, I'm going to be busy all day tomorrow so I thought I would get it to you tonight so that you can respond throughout the day instead of late tomorrow night. Anyways, I came across this article about the music cloud and found it really interesting so I thought I would share it with the class. I'm sure you've all heard about the cloud, and might even have data stored on it; but if not its basically an online database that you can store stuff on and then access that information via your computer, phone, and even tv. I think the cloud in general is a great idea and a huge opportunity for many businesses. Amazon on Tuesday, however, launched the Amazon Cloud Drive, an internet service that lets its customers store music and other digital files on the companies' servers; a more everyday consumer focused market. Google and Apple have been trying to make this move for awhile now but have been waiting for record labels to get on board with licensing agreements. Amazon is clearly taking huge legal risks, do you think these risks are going to be worth the potential lawsuits? As college students every one of us listens to all kinds of music, would you personally be interested in storing your music on Amazon's Cloud Drive? This article was more out of interest as opposed to the financial crisis... any other comments about the music cloud??? See link here
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For the record the hyperlink does not work (at least for me). However I did find an article on the issue.
ReplyDeletehttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703461504576231063834498824.html?KEYWORDS=MobileMe+Will+Store+iTunes+Library+Online
I personally do not know that much about the cloud, however I do use Apple's MobileMe. While I can't access that from a television, I can still store up to 10GB of data online, including music files. However, this service costs money and my iTunes library is far larger than 10GB.
As far as the legal issues are concerned, I'm not sure how much of a case the music companies are going to be able to make considering services such as Amazon's already exist to some degree. The article states: "For its new consumer offering, Amazon argued Tuesday it doesn't need to negotiate new licenses from the music industry because its Cloud Drive is akin to a user storing files on an external hard drive." Because the service is password protected, it is assumed that only one user will be using this service to access their own files.
iTunes has combated copyright violations by only allowing up to 5 computers to be authorized to play their songs, and this password authorization shows up when songs are transferred via flashdrives and the internet. However, as many users have quickly realized, burning the music onto a CD is an easy way to get around this problem. It will be interesting to see what Amazon will do if they are required to come up with some sort copyright protection.
Agreeing with Becky on this one, this service does already exist to some degree and makes current services, like Comcast on demand on both a TV and your personal computer more streamlined.
ReplyDeleteThe Amazon cloud is very intriguing to me, I always forget to back up my external harddrive, and this could be an efficient and effective servcie.