1:46 PM
Amazon cloud - The proximate cause of all this corporate spleen is the launch last week of Amazon's Cloud Drive service. At first sight, it seems straightforward: it looks like a digital locker in which one may (for a fee) securely store one's digital assets in the internet "cloud". "Anything digital, securely stored," runs the blurb, "available anywhere." The first 5GB of storage is free, with more available at an annual cost of a dollar per gigabyte. Upload files to your "cloud drive", where they are stored online and from where they can be accessed by any device that you own.
So far, so innocuous. It's not the online storage business that has Apple, Google & Co spitting feathers, but the Amazon Cloud Player which goes along with the digital locker. If you buy music from the company's vast MP3 store, then it's stored for free in the locker, whence it can be streamed to your computer – and, more importantly, to any Android phone or tablet via a special app created by Amazon. You can also upload the contents of your music library to Cloud Drive (though you will have to pay for space over 5GB). This means users will be able to stream "their" music for free.
Watching these developments, the musician David Bowie must be feeling a warm glow of justification. In 2002 he predicted that music would, one day, "become like running water or electricity". Bowie had recognised that iPod users were, in effect, the audio equivalent of travellers to primitive countries who carry bottled water because public supplies are unsafe. In a comprehensively networked world, he surmised, people would eventually become more relaxed about carrying their own bottled music: when they needed it, they would just get it streamed from the network Next >
Amazon's new Cloud Drive rains on everyone's parade
So far, so innocuous. It's not the online storage business that has Apple, Google & Co spitting feathers, but the Amazon Cloud Player which goes along with the digital locker. If you buy music from the company's vast MP3 store, then it's stored for free in the locker, whence it can be streamed to your computer – and, more importantly, to any Android phone or tablet via a special app created by Amazon. You can also upload the contents of your music library to Cloud Drive (though you will have to pay for space over 5GB). This means users will be able to stream "their" music for free.
Watching these developments, the musician David Bowie must be feeling a warm glow of justification. In 2002 he predicted that music would, one day, "become like running water or electricity". Bowie had recognised that iPod users were, in effect, the audio equivalent of travellers to primitive countries who carry bottled water because public supplies are unsafe. In a comprehensively networked world, he surmised, people would eventually become more relaxed about carrying their own bottled music: when they needed it, they would just get it streamed from the network Next >
