I think Amazon is trying to become the backbone for the 'alternative' set of Android core apps that will inevitably be developed. These apps will appeal to any carrier/OEM that wants to stop licensing from Google, or from companies like Amazon and Facebook who may launch their own devices with splintered versions of Android.
My guess is that Amazon will own content delivery for these devices (books, movies, TV, music) and that Microsoft will round out the rest, with a Bing Maps app and an email app that supports Gmail etc but syncs nicely with Hotmail (which has been totally overhauled since you last tried it). This is entirely a guess on my part, mind you.
I think it's bold of Amazon to launch essentially a minimum viable product and beat Apple to the punch. Now they have customers and are getting meaningful feedback to make future improvements. You rarely see this outside of Apple and startups. I'm glad to see Apple running into some real competition.
Go look at all the complaining from when the iPhone original was announced and came out. It didn't have a number of features that were considered at the time required:
The original release of the operating system included Visual Voicemail, multi-touch gestures, HTML email, Safari web browser, threaded text messaging, and YouTube. However, many features like MMS, third-party apps, and copy and paste were not supported at release. These missing features led to hackers "jailbreaking" their phones which added these missing features. Official software updates slowly added these features.
Looking back now they clearly did the right thing. In articles at the time when journalists did a feature comparisons it lost. But when people and journalists actually used it - it was awesome. I argue a product can be both a MVC and have simple, powerful, useful, polished features. Just look at the ipod and iphone (yeah similar reviews happened for ipod. See the infamous Slashdot quote).
Another example is the 1st generation iPod. Did just enough to solidify market share, then started evolving. You don't see people ooh and ahhing over a wheel anymore now that we are firmly onto touch pads.
Edit: Another example is iTunes (why couldn't you buy things directly on your device) or their office productivity suite.
I mean I'd hardly consider the original iPhone a minimum viable product. Smart phones had been around for years, and what the iPhone did was redefine the smart phone. I guess in some weird sense you could say that it was a minimum viable product for the future of other products that were like it, but you could say that for any product. In general, I would definitely not typify Apple as a company that gets to the fight first, but rather one that changes the fight when it gets there. That was true of the iPhone in the smart phone market, true of the iPod in the mp3 market, true of the iPad in the tablet market, and will likely be true of whatever special sauce Apple is planning for mobileme in the virtual locker market. My point is that Apple is not a company that throws out a product into consumer space with the knowledge that it is incomplete and seeking tons of consumer feedback. They release extremely polished products to a market, often with what I would argue is an unparalleled mastery of minimalism in their features (in terms of leaving a lot out of their products and only keeping in what they deem absolutely necessary to most users), which could be confused for minimum viability if you didn't know better. I would suggest Google as a better example of a big company that often releases products with the intention of quickly updating them once they start getting feedback. Facebook might be another less convincing example.
I think Amazon is going to be more tight with their platform than even Microsoft. (e.g. Carriers would not even be in the OS update path)
While many of the pieces will be available to any android device, I don't think carriers/OEMs are likely to partner too tightly with a company that aims to release its own first-party hardware.
Glad to see the comments flood in for this and see it hit #1 on HN so quickly as I was beginning to wonder when it would ship. I was contracted to work on the Amazon MP3 v2.0 app rearchitecting the download architecture and adding cloud drive download support. It was "very interesting" being the only outside contractor / software architect level dev to be hired by A2Z / Amazon to work on core architecture for Amazon MP3. I finished my involvement mid-Feb. I guess I'm just posting to get an account started here on HN as I'm launching some very compelling Android platform / middleware soon called TyphonRT. I've been bootstrapping for years and this recent Amazon MP3 contract has opened up enough runway for me to launch my tech in the coming months. Hopefully I'll have some more time to post in the future too.
If you want a free service to stream your music from your home computer to your work computer/android/iOS device, check out my service: http://www.audiogalaxy.com
Since we don't store the music in the cloud, we don't have any size limits (the current winner has about 530,000 files). Obviously this only works if you leave your home computer on, but we've found that isn't a problem for most folks.
Wow! I'd been thinking about researching iTunes -> iPhone streaming apps, but now I don't even have to — I know wholeheartedly that anything y'all put out is going to be awesome. It's weird to realize that 'brands' really do have worth.
Audiogalaxy 1.0 was the first to really execute on an amazing new UX since the days of IRC Fserves and Napster, and after your legal problems it wasn't till OiNK (and now what.cd) showed up years later that anything nearly as good was available.
The one where you searched from your browser and then opened some small hash file into the client which did the sharing, right? Not unlike the later BitTorrent.
Yeah, everything was browser based, except for the small app that ran on the desktop. We handled all the queues and the download scheduling on the server though -- no need for the client to open anything.
That was brilliant. I left the client up at home and could queue stuff up while at school. When I got home I had a bunch of new music to listen to. Great idea!
Thanks! That was my first lesson in how inspiring constraints can be -- we didn't have the resources to make a good client UI, so we put it on the website instead.
I'm currently using subsonic on my home server to stream my music, subsonic is guaranteed to be free forever, is open source, runs anywhere java does, transcodes formats, does video, allows downloads/uploads, has multiple full-featured mobile apps for almost every mobile platform, pretty much everything you could want. Setup is easy as pie, and it will even give you a subdomain in subsonic.org if you donate to the developer.
As far as I can see, your service is subsonic + the hassle of registering, yet another company with your personal details, less features and the possibility that it may become a freemium service in the future.
Just downloaded it. Is there or can there be an option to keep the traffic inside my LAN, on the home side of my router? Seems a waste of my ISP bandwidth to stream from one room in my house to another.
Everything looks fine on my end. Shoot me an email (see my profile) and we'll figure it out. YC doesn't hit quite as hard as LifeHacker did last year. :)
My music sits on a ReadyNAS Duo (fantastic value, low power, always on), which runs Debian. It would be very nice if the helper application worked there too.
This is actually a little bit worrying as an entrepreneur building things on top of Amazon's Web Services.
Amazon has always made a point of not building services on top of its Cloud offerings that directly compete with its users. Cloud Drive sets a precedent for them as the first time they've gone against that principle.
There are lots of "low hanging fruit" companies that were built on the understanding that Amazon wasn't interested in implementing that stuff themselves. There's no debating that this will make Amazon a ton of money. It remains to be seen, however, how much it will cost them in developer loyalty and businesses that never get built because "If they did it to JungleDisk, they'll do it to us".
This doesn't make sense. This isn't like Facebook or iOS where you are a sharecropper working their platform and they can pull the rug from under you at anytime. The platform here is the web, Amazon doesn't own the web, any company you build on the web could attract competition from anybody else. Building your business on top of Amazon's top-notch infrastructure doesn't give Amazon any advantage if they decide to compete against you. And nothing would stop you from moving off of their stuff if it did. I don't know why anyone would have the "understanding" that Amazon wasn't going to compete against them. Amazon's cloud actually evens the playing field, there's nothing stopping you from building a bookstore and competing against Amazon using their own servers against them.
The products I mention are things like Cloud Monitoring tools, Management services for your AWS instances, and other things specific to Amazon Web Services. One of my products, for example, is a service that runs detailed reports on the usage logs that Amazon generates for Cloudfront and S3. Amazon could wipe it out completely with a feature that wouldn't even make the front page here.
They've deliberately stayed away from those areas that have products in them. You're right though that this is one area where "AWS" wasn't a necessary component for the service in question. That could help explain why they're comfortable doing it.
> I would argue that only one thing is entirely predictable about closed platforms: they will do whatever is in the business's interest. When building your business on someone else's platform, you should always assume that if it is in the platform owner's interest, they will shut you down tomorrow with no warning.
> So, you need to do two things at the very least:
> 1. Ensure your goals and the platform owner's goals are always in harmonious agreement.
> 2. Have a backup plan for what happens if your access to the platform is revoked tomorrow.
> People seem to keep learning this lesson over and over again... with Facebook, with Twitter, and these days with Apple...
I don't think that's quite comparable. Contrary to platforms like Google App Engine or iOS, the core infrastructure AWS offers is sufficiently open and commonplace that you wouldn't have such a hard time moving away from them in the unlikely event that they'll throw you out. This is simply a case of a much more classical business dilemma: a big company decides to build a product that competes with your small company. The somewhat strange thing about this case is that the big company is also providing the infrastructure for your small company so they win regardless of whichever product wins, but not at the cost of the small company's ability to build a better product.
The other side of that coin is that, if it is easy to move somewhere else, Amazon does not have that special of a product. If that is the case, how are they going to compete? Both price and quality are options, but even those are forms of lock-in, if they keep customers in-house.
Agreed. It's generally a bad idea to build your entire product around a missing feature in the Big Guy's thing.
The surprising thing about Amazon, however, is that they've gone out of their way to be the exception to that rule over the last 4 years. JungleDisk was the posterchild for "business that will only last until Amazon incorporates their product as a feature", and yet it continued to survive as Amazon released infrastructure product after infrastructure product. And in the few cases where they did move into a space where somebody had built something, they did it delicately and cooperatively. They really were the Good Guy.
I'm hoping that this was just the one space that so obviously needed filling from a Company Strategy perspective that they're making an exception in this case. They've built up a lot of goodwill. It'd be a shame to see it squandered.
JungleDisk isn't a missing feature in Amazons product, it's a full product in it's own regard, and as thus, Amazon doesn't have a clear way of shutting them down or are even in a particularly beneficial position to compete with JungleDisk.
Also, JungleDisk already competing against a whole slew of worthy competitors, some of which run on S3, some of which don't.
Which is all the more poignant because at a higher level here we have Amazon confidently building on Google's platform, in direct competition with Google's own services, knowing they can do so without prejudice.
Amongst all the argument about "open"-ness and what it means, whether it's source code or something else - for me this is the important part. If a competitor can build on a platform and safely do so in competition with the interests of the platform owner then that platform is "open" in the real sense that matters.
I would say that that the music side of things was the driver here--not to be a cloud-drive competitor. They are going to make a ton of money selling music and letting people play it from the cloud. I think the CloudDrive as a standalone storage product is more of a by-product (they needed the drive product to create the player product).
From what I calculated, it's cheaper than storing files straight in S3 (atleast at the 500G level). So their "retail" is cheaper than their "wholesale". I think it's probably not much of a profit source for them.
Actually, I don't believe anyone had created an Android music player that pulled songs from S3 and allowed purchase from the Amazon store. The opportunity was there, but it was not taken.
> Amazon has always made a point of not building services on top of its Cloud offerings that directly compete with its users.
This doesn't strike me as true.
Amazon CloudWatch versus CloudKick
Amazon SimpleEmailService versus SendGrid
Amazon RDS versus FantomDB
Frankly, looking at AWS's evolution, it seems that one of their favorite methods of innovation is to watch for startups that are servicing a lot of AWS companies, then creating their own version of that product.
Because if they establish a reputation of watching what people are building on their platform, then copying it and driving those businesses out of the market, they'll alienate their developer community.
I think there are two really interesting things about this:
• This is the first time Amazon has pulled together the two major branches of their business, retail and cloud infrastructure, into something (dare I say it?) synergetic.
• Amazon is taking the first steps into the non-retail consumer web, where, if successful, they'll probably give a good scare to a handful of startups as they sweep across segments (and without the Google / Facebook-like startup shopping).
Not necessarily true, really. When you save your current location on a Kindle, that's handled by an app running on EC2. That's just an example: I am sure pretty much all of Amazon's products use the AWS infrastructure.
Just put aside that, is it actually any legal reason for using things like dropbox to upload music purchased and streamed for private uses?
BTW that one album/20GB offers only last until the end of the year, and it only last for a year. After that, you would have the habit of using the service but be reverted to the free plan.
However since all the new purchases on amazon are automatically saved without counting towards the quota, I guess that solves the problem for many android users. Just that I don't listen to many of bands/artists that put their songs on Amazon MP3 may make this offer less appealing.
Fortunately for us non-US folk, this Minimum Viable Product also has a Minimum Viable BarbarianWall that's easily circumvented.
In this case, the only step of the process that checks your foreign-ness is the first one, where you accept the license agreement. So if you have a US VPN, you can quickly bypass the wall and get signed up. Then it's open to use directly from there.
Or better still, since it's Amazon, you can fire up one of their handy EC2 Windows boxes in New Jersey, remote desktop in and IE your way to http://amazon.com/clouddrive. It's a few minutes of pain, followed by a nickel charged to your Amazon account, but it gets you in to try this thing.
Just that I don't listen to many of bands/artists that put their songs on Amazon MP3 may make this offer less appealing.
I don't know much about this but cdbaby[1] will do that for what seems like an affordable price. It just takes a bit of effort and sacrificing some profits in lieu of better distribution. I'm not saying it's right for everyone, but it's possible to get music out there if you are an artist. And cdbaby will let artists choose where/how they digitally distribute so artists could just choose Amazon MP3 if they wished.
I'm in Australia and that's what it looked like to me initially too, but after manually uploading an MP3 and then attempting to play it, the Cloud Player then worked.
I don't understand these types of comments. I have the same problem with Spotify in the US, but I don't feel the need to share that I can't use Spotify whenever a Spotify discussion comes up -- everyone is well aware of country restrictions already.
The difference is that this is a new product. You are comparing one that came out long before. This could lead to people verifying this claim and hey, people have tried to make it work out of US.
Besides that, I also try to attract people with the backgrounds of the legal side in US, to explain the ground for making this service legal and the issues on fair-use particularly in US.
"The 5 GB free storage plan is available to all Amazon.com customers, however further upgrades to the storage plan are currently unavailable in the following countries:
Austria
, Belgium
, Bulgaria
, Cyprus
, Czech Republic
, Denmark
, Estonia
, Finland
, France
, Germany
, Greece
, Hungary
, Ireland
, Italy
, Latvia
, Lithuania
, Luxembourg
, Malta
, Netherlands
, Poland
, Portugal
, Romania
, Slovakia
, Slovenia
, Spain
, Sweden
, United Kingdom"
I know that in Belgium there is a law where storage which can be used to play pirated media has a surcharge that is used to compensate authors for the possible loss of income because of the potential pirating.
Maybe this is a European directive and enforced in all of those countries, and they need to figure out how they're going to approach this law.
Streaming seems a bit silly when I've got 16 gigs sitting empty on my phone. I just want synching. I'll use Pandora if I want to stream. And then I'm not restricted to just my library.
I have around 60GB of FLACs on my hard drive. At LAME's V0 encoding, that's around 20GB of MP3s. And it's ever increasing. Considering that SDHC has a max of 32GB and SDXC doesn't have much support (much less microSDXC), there's definitely a market for something like this. (Probably very niche, but eh... Amazon seems to be positioning this as kind of a Box.net thing with an emphasis on music storage and playback)
I think the hype has raced ahead of the technology here. "Streaming everything" on today's smartphones seems to give you about 2 hrs of battery life, a problem for which there does not appear to be a near-term solution. Moreover, no wireless network in America could support that mode of usage on a large scale, and that will also be true for the foreseeable future. Or so it seems to me -- anyone in the know care to comment?
I wouldn't imagine "streaming everything" is the way to interpret this.
Think of it more like Dropbox-style-sync for your whole phone (likely configurable to only happen when in wifi), plus the option to stream if you really want.
The average user will be using the wifi-sync by default without even realizing it and probably never even consider streaming all their music.
There is a solution, which several companies already implement (Rdio and Spotify, at least). You can sync tracks to your device. I haven't used MOG or Rhapsody so I'm not sure if they do it as well (anyone?) but it seems like the obvious solution. It's the best of both worlds, as you can still stream if you want.
I tried uploading a file to the cloud drive using Chrome, and then I viewed the file. I copied the URL and pasted it into Firefox, where I was not logged in to amazon.com or their cloud storage. It still loaded the file. If you tried doing this with a gmail message, gmail would prompt you to log in. I am not too familiar with cloud storage. Is this a security issue?
The first time I tried it, I used a PDF file, since it opens in the browser and I could easily access the URL. I just tried again, and I was able to replicate the issue I mentioned, this time using Chrome and Internet Explorer. I tried uploading a different file type (a simple text file) that also loads in the browser, and I was able to replicate with that file as well.
I happened to download an album from the Amazon mp3 Android app and they are giving me 20 GB for free for a year. If I don't upgrade (start paying) they'll revert me to the 5GB plan after the year is up.
Yeah, my collection is 120 GB. I'd love to try this just so I could DJ from my whole collection while at a friend's house (instead of just what's on my phone) but wouldn't pay ~$200 for the privelege.
Free persistent storage of Amazon digital downloads is the big feature here (to me). I've always thought it was insane how Steam lets you download dozens of gigabytes of video games ad infinitum, yet Apple's and Amazon's music stores require you to backup your digital purchases.
Can anyone see AmazonMP3 tracks in their library? I've purchased tons of music from AmazonMP3, and Cloud Player shows an empty library & 0 purchased songs. It seems like a big miss to launch this way. Hopefully it's just a bug.
If that's the case, I'd bet it's for license reasons. An AmazonMP3 purchase made after Cloud Drive is launched could be described as having been copied for personal use, at the time of purchase, to your Cloud Drive.
Allowing previously purchased tracks to be streamed without first uploading them looks more like what Lala was doing, and they had to negotiate streaming licenses. Though I'd wonder if there is any real implementation difference in Amazon's case.
I suspect this 5GB quote is a "fake", since there is no need to actually "copy" a song to the User's virtual drive, rather add a pointer to a copy already available on their platform, that is, if 1M users are buying a popular song, there is no need to clone this song million times, right?
Having said that, since there are smart people working on this platform on amazon, I am sure they don't make a physical clone, which raises the question already mentioned above, why limit to 5GB?
There is no cap on music purchased from Amazon MP3 (going forward). The cap is on uploaded files, since there is no way to link your uploaded copy of Bad Romance with my uploaded copy of Bad Romance and know that they are the same.
Surely there is in fact a way, at least much of the time. In general, I assume encoding a digitized song with a given codec and quality settings is deterministic, so the files have some chance of being identical. Next, if the track were identified using a common process (e.g. CDDB) it might easily be possible to identify them as being identical in origin and then perform some tests to see if they are in fact identical and convert one into a pointer to the other.
My suggested approach assumes hash as a baseline approach (identify actually identical files -- which DropBox is apparently already doing) and goes beyond this (identify files that are identical in source and intent, but different owing to random trivial errors).
In case you missed it in Amazon's terms, the free upgrade is temporary. It expires in a year, at which point you can start paying or be bumped back down to the free level.
...you will be automatically eligible for the 20 GB plan for one year from
the date of your MP3 album purchase. Unless you set your account to auto-renew
to a paid plan, the 20 GB plan will revert to a free plan one year from the
date of your MP3 album purchase.
I doubt this will stick. The reason is because ultimately that means Amazon will be put in a position to delete peoples' files (if they fail to pay for their 20GB that month it reverts.) That could lead to lawsuits etc, probably not worth the chump change they'll save by revertting those plans.
Maybe they'll just render some random portion of the files inaccessible unless you pay up? Or just make your account read-only until you clear out enough of the files. Plenty of ways to handle it without wholesale deletion.
They fact that they are going to start backing up the Amazon MP3s is great news. Previously it was impossible to redownload a track once you have already downloaded it. Luckily I did not lose to much music when I got a new computer since I had a personal backup.
I would love Amazon Cloud Drive to have desktop integration like Dropbox.
Doesn't google have a cloud service now? It just doesn't have a pretty GUI or desktop integration?
The music aspect of this makes a great headline - and also great case for why the avg joe consumer should want all this cloud storage.
But for me the real story here is the ability to store any file or document, and aggressive prices of bigger storage tiers.
Dropbox's prices have always seemed unreasonably high to me - and I'm tempted to move all my personal docs over to Amazon and use DropBox just for social sharing.
The OS X uploader requires installation of Adobe AIR. Adobe bloatware? Another piece of software checking for updates? Another piece of software that needs to be updated? No thank you. I'm all for getting a product out the door, but is a native OS X app that much trouble for an organization like Amazon? Does this bother anyone else, or is it just me?
It's becoming clear that the main competitor for iPad will come from Amazon. Apple will not be beat by a competitor on look and feel. Anyone who wants to compete with them will need to find their own area of strength. Amazon's strength is its years of experience with Amazon Web Services.
Recall the article opining that Amazon will be giving away Kindles to Prime members by November 2011 (so far, price drops are on a straight line to $0 then, and when asked Bezos said "oh, you noticed?" and smiled). Maybe they are gearing up for an iPad-type model, laying the groundwork for users buying into disparate parts (streaming video, cloud storage, ebooks, etc.) so when the convergence arrives millions of customers will find themselves already living a ubiquitous Amazon life.
Is using the term "cloud" a branding / marketing mistake?
The cloud is generic and multi-vendor. It's a utility. This angle makes sense when talking to developers.
OTOH, I could see a lot of users being confused because they put stuff "in the cloud", but they can't get it back (from another vendor i.e. different cloud).
> The cloud is generic and multi-vendor. It's a utility. This angle makes sense when talking to developers.
I just set my dad up with SFTP on a dreamhost account, and he keeps calling it his "cloud storage" account. I think beyond the developer world it's starting to just mean "I don't have to back it up, and I can reach it from anywhere."
You agree not to do that, and Amazon has your real name if you've ever made a purchase &| uploaded >5gigs of music. Most people I know use their Amazon account for other purchases and won't risk their account being closed for violating the terms.
Yeah account sharing is watched and when detected the suspect account will get flagged for a TOS violation. I can't tell you how quickly the ban hammer may come down as things go, but 2 devices is likely not going to trigger it.
Storage cost is $1/yr/GB which is similar to Amazon's S3 reduced redundancy storage. It is unclear which level of reliability Amazon is promising for the cloud drive. If it is the higher level, it is a good deal.
If you use enough bandwidth it's a good deal even for the reduced redundancy storage. Only having a web interface makes it a lot less simple than Dropbox, though.
Lack of an iOS player is interesting. I don't see a technical reason why Amazon couldn't make one. Ditto with an iOS video player for Amazon Video-on-Demand. Not making either of those (plus the Amazon Appstore & Kindle) makes me think Amazon is working on an Android platform of their own. They have the capabilities for a pretty solid media-ecosystem (music, video, apps, books, etc).
It actually looks like they could make the web-based UI work in Mobile Safari without too much work. (Easy for me to say.) The UI renders perfectly already. As far as I can tell, playback is the only thing that doesn't work. (But if you "download" a track it'll open in the built-in quicktime player and start playing.)
Despite the Flash requirement for uploading, they're already doing non-Flash playback. I don't have Flash installed on my desktop and playback works great.
Seeing as Safari has had background audio support since before it was granted to third-party apps, the web UI would be a decent stopgap in lieu if a native iOS app.
In a recent article about html5 audio there was a lot of talk about how safari intentionally didn't support automatic audio playback (vs. say chrome and chrome lite). I'm guessing that this would mean you'd have to click a button each time the song changed in your playlist - this would probably suck enough that it explains why they didn't launch with mobile safari support.
Damn, you're right. I'd played around with Cloud Player a bit last night in Safari/Mac, but I guess I never let it play two songs in a row. I just tried to play an album and it stopped after the first song.
I wonder if they're doing anything clever to reduce storage size. For example - an MP3/AAC song purchased from the same service has a small unique header (e.g. where your iTunes account name is stored) and then identical music data.
I imagine the music companies would have a hissy fit and demand streaming payments if that was the case though.
In my mind there is no question that they'll be doing de-duplication here. You don't need to rely on a header key, you just take something like a sha1 hash and the size. Services like dropbox do this - even making it so you don't have to upload non-unique files. I have always assumed that all of the non-encrypted remote backup solutions that live on s3 or elsewhere do this too. It's just too easy for a massive storage space savings to not do it.
It doesn't seem like they currently do this, but it would be great if Amazon applied file de-duplication (like Dropbox) to at least music files. If I'm trying to upload a song that Amazon already has on its own servers, it should just use that copy instead of uploading a new copy from my computer.
MP3.com once got in a ton of hot water for a version of that. They had an integrated ripping system that if they already had the content it just checked the "hash" of the TOC and granted you access to the music. In this way you could borrow a stack of cds and very quickly have access to all of your friends music.
I'm not sure if having to upload your music before it's de-duplicated makes a legal difference, but I bet it came into play. I have long thought of the possibility of hacking up the dropbox binary to fake hashes of known music I didn't have and get access instantly
Judge Jed S. Rakoff, in the case UMG v. MP3.com, ruled in favor of the record labels against MP3.com and the service on the copyright law provision of "making mechanical copies for commercial use without permission from the copyright owner." Before damage was awarded, MP3.com settled with plaintiff, UMG Recordings, for $53.4 million, in exchange for the latter's permission to use its entire music collection.
It's surprising that their player doesn't work in Mobile Safari. On my iPod touch, I can load the page and see my music (though it helpfully tells me I should upgrade to IE), but nothing will play.
I notice that they used Flash for the uploader. Surely they wouldn't have used it as the only option for the player.
What happens if your phone is in a poor reception area, or without internet connection? Then you can't listen to music? Can the app manage which songs you'd also like to have stored locally on the phone?
Is this meant to supplement your old ways of syncing music to the phone or replace it?
I like this... But I would like ti more if there is a webdav address to access the storage from my iPad. I know that there are other solutions, but 5GB free...
Does anybody knows how to access Amazon Cloud Drive using Webdab?
That and the Cloud Player can be accessed on Android devices. Meta info wins me over. It's frustrating to see inconsistent meta tags on things like Grooveshark.
It feels like amazon is slowly dismantling the advantages of other content services. It's now competing head to head with one or several other companies within each media space.
I wonder how telling this is:
"We do not guarantee that Your Files will not be subject to misappropriation, loss or damage and we will not be liable if they are. You're responsible for maintaining appropriate security, protection and backup of Your Files."
Is it "use at your own risk no matter how much money you pay us"?
I don't get your example? You cite one use of the iPad and compared it to my statement. So this means I'm looking at it too narrowly? Elaborate please?
You cite one use of Amazon Cloud Drive, which I compared to. Yes, the point was to illustrate you're looking at it too narrowly.
To elaborate:
Yes, Amazon Cloud Drive can act like iTunes, insofar as you buy tracks from Amazon and can play them thru a browser via the MP3 player. No question Amazon will, like Apple & iTunes, expand this ability by using this "cloud drive" as the focal point for an assortment of applications, now that Amazon is in the e-book, e-movie, e-music, etc. business. I expect the Kindle will start using this in both overt and covert fashion. As Amazon observes what people use their "cloud drive" for, they will provide matching services to enhance and lock-in use thereof. The intent is to make this a disruptive product: its full potential may be unclear, but it's the groundwork for new ways of doing things - and new ways for Amazon to make money.
I guess I was looking at it from a point of view of 'what it is now'. A kind of dropbox+iTunes mashup.
You're coming from a 'what it could be' which is at best guess in your own words, unclear. Right now they are using music as a beach head into the market. In future it could be something video or word processing related.
Yes. You don't give away a million 5GB cloud "drives" for free without some plan to leverage it beyond mere paying for more storage. The model may work for Dropbox, but Amazon has bigger plans.
hopefully they add the ability to bulk export. otherwise, you are semi-locked into this cloud music solution. what happens when a better/cheaper service comes out and you need to move your music?
Would be great if it wasn't illegal to actually upload your music collection on there. I doubt that when you bought your music you got the right to distribute it to a third party which means uploading it onto Amazon's servers would constitute copyright infringement. Songs bought from Amazon probably come with a license that allows you to upload it to Amazon Cloud Player now, but with the music you already own and Music you buy somewhere else you're out of luck.
My guess is that Amazon will own content delivery for these devices (books, movies, TV, music) and that Microsoft will round out the rest, with a Bing Maps app and an email app that supports Gmail etc but syncs nicely with Hotmail (which has been totally overhauled since you last tried it). This is entirely a guess on my part, mind you.