I wouldn’t be surprised if a version of Dropbox that plays nicely with the Cloud Drive is one of the first Cloud Drive apps on the scene. It makes a great deal of sense. Instead of paying Dropbox for storage and syncing, we could just pay them for syncing.
It seems rather unlikely to me that people would pay dropbox for their syncing service to store things on someone else's paid storage. I would think that the dropbox software exists to drive people to their relatively high margin de-duplicated cloud storage subscriptions.
In a similar fashion it seems likely to me that Cloud Drive exists to drive adoption & volume to Amazon digital music, a market that dwarfs the size of the online storage game.
Cloud Drive is one thing, but I think that Cloud Player has the really interesting, disruptive potential with respect to services like Pandora, Last.fm, and even Youtube and ITunes.
People listen to a lot of music on each of those services. The way I see it, each is just an approximation of the holy grail: the ability to listen to any song, anytime, on demand, for free.
Youtube comes close, but it has quite a lot of music that's only available in low quality and quite a bit that's blocked on copyright grounds.
ITunes fulfills the other requirements, but is not free.
Pandora is free, on-demand, and high-quality, but you have limited control over what you listen to and they have fairly disruptive audio ads.
Cloud player could come closer to goal.
I think Cloud Player could benefit indirectly but massively from the fact that music piracy is common. Many people I know (and, I'd venture, many people on HN) have music libraries in the tens of GB--obviously not obtained by paying $0.99 per song.
How could Amazon offer, say, 100GB for a small enough price (much smaller than the current $100/year for Cloud Drive) ? You mentioned that Dropbox does deduplication.
There's huge overlap between most people's music collections. Quite a few IPods I've seen contain exactly the same 500MB Beatles' discography. It's an awesome use case for deduplication. I think that as long as they restrict uploads to music (and, perhaps, movies), they could pull this off for surprisingly little storage cost on their end.
Combine it with the aggressive CDN strategy they already have (to reduce bandwidth costs), and you could have the the next killer music app. Imagine your own curated, high quality music collection, streamed to you anywhere for a buck or so per month, with the app available for free on all the major platforms.
a) digital content sales (amazon mp3 store)
b) paid cloud music host for pirates
Selling MP3's is clearly a superior business, and they are to some extent at odds with each other. What's more, we know that Amazon has contractual relationships with the majors and plenty of other music players. If they defacto condoned piracy they could end up getting a lot of grief over it from their partners.
Note that storing your pirated files on the service is against the TOU:
You must ensure that you have all the necessary rights in Your Files that permit you to use the Service without infringing the rights of any copyright owners, violating any applicable laws or violating the terms of any license or agreement to which you are bound
And they have the right to inspect your files to ensure, among other things, your compliance with the TOU:
You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files: [...] to investigate compliance with the terms of this Agreement, enforce the terms of this Agreement
Whats more, the way music is commonly pirated means many illicit copies will have very common and identifiable names and hashes. The way amazon will be doing de-duplication means they'll automatically have indexed lists of every user that has a copy of each file without even trying to make one.
While I'm unsure if they'd want to do anything about it for PR reasons, given their interests and those of their partners I certainly wouldn't suggest using Cloud Drive for files you don't have legitimate rights to.
In a bit of an unlikely what-if scenario, imagine Amazon + Warner Brothers offering you a one time chance to pay $3000 to buy all the questionable music in your account or they'll refer the matter to their attorneys?
1) Grooveshark exists, it approximates the holy grail in my opinion, not all the way there but pretty damn close.
2) We do not know if Amazon could or would crack down on suspect pirated music. As stated in another comment, they have some rights concerning your files.
3) Will Apple allow a native cloud player for iOS? Perhaps an HTML5 version could work.
I agree, that's something that https://www.jungledisk.com/ already does and frankly I just prefer dealing with one entity because the experience is better.
I'm looking forward to an API that lets third parties add files to your Cloud Drive. Buy music, get it in your Cloud Drive. Buy a netbook, get the restore CD image in your Cloud Drive. Buy a DVD, get it in your Cloud Drive, etc. Amazon seems to be thinking about this in terms of "when you buy music from your phone it ends up in Cloud Drive", but what I want is for every bit of data I ever pay for to end up here. Because upload speeds are super-slow: it would take hours for me to upload that restore CD. But downloads are fast. So do the uploads Somewhere Else once, and let everyone else download it from their Cloud Drive.
Is this typical of cloud storage? I read through their ToS and found that they retain the right to access your files.
5.2.Our Right to Access Your Files. You give us the right to access, retain, use and disclose your account information and Your Files: to provide you with technical support and address technical issues; to investigate compliance with the terms of this Agreement, enforce the terms of this Agreement and protect the Service and its users from fraud or security threats; or as we determine is necessary to provide the Service or comply with applicable law.
Consent to Access Your Files
BY UTILIZING THE SITE, CONTENT, FILES AND/OR SERVICES,
YOU CONSENT TO ALLOW DROPBOX TO ACCESS YOUR COMPUTER
TO ACCESS ANY FILES THAT ARE PLACED IN THE 'MY DROPBOX',
'DROPBOX' FOLDERS, AND/OR ANY OTHER FOLDER WHICH YOU
CHOOSE TO LINK TO DROPBOX.
Is this intended for the program to access the files and send them to the server? Or does this mean the bad thing, that nothing is really private?
Somebody should create a simple little app on top of S3 that runs on all your devices and creates an automatically synced folder. They should make it free for the first couple GB too.
Um: DropBox has an API. DropBox does version control. DropBox syncs.
Cloud Drive has no API yet. Doesn't do version control. Doesn't sync. (But it is half as much per GB as DropBox.) Oh and it has a half-assed media player.
The problem is that unless you give us 50GB+ for free, the space difference and cost difference are pretty much irrelevant.
If Amazon's pricing hurts DropBox then DropBox will probably chance its pricing. DropBox's pricing was determined before Cloud Drive appeared. If it turns out that convenience and functionality don't matter as much as cost per GB then DropBox will be forced to adapt.
I suspect you could wait a while for convenience and functionality to not matter.
If your needs aren't met by dropbox's free plan, the cheapest plan they offer is $99 for 50 GB a year.
In comparison, amazon is offering 100 GB for the same $100 a year, and even has cheaper paid plans (e.g. $20 per year for 20 gb).
So, dropbox is currently expensive on two fronts; Amazon gives more GB/$ and also has lower-priced plans for more modest needs.
This is a big win for some users, like kunjaan and me, because we haven't been too thrilled with Dropbox's syncing abilities (tons of "conflicted copies" everywhere). Furthermore, a large portion of our data doesn't need to be synced; it simply needs to be available. This includes data like ebooks, music collection, pictures.
or just find a bunch of people and refer them to dropbox. I have over 10 gig just from referrals. Mind you then you become so dependent on it that once the free space is in use, you will have to upgrade. However at that point, you will gladly pony up $99.
This article is kind of backwards to me. Dropbox has an API, and Amazon didn't release one with their Cloud Drive.
It's also kind of silly to say that Amazon has mastered storage, but give Dropbox no credit. They obviously have data storage as a core technology.
Syncing isn't that valuable to me as a technology. Dropbox didn't invent it. They borrowed it from elsewhere and Amazon could do the same if they wanted to.
The version 2 of dropbox he refers to already exists, it's called JungleDisk. It works on bring your own storage (S3 and now few others), and you get to keep your own crypto key. It added sync while back.
Been using it for few years, since I was not that comfortable put all my files in the cloud.
I don't know if I like the idea of a "Dropbox V2" that directly uses your separately-purchased Cloud Drive storage. I use Dropbox for portable backups of a few small but important files (my resume, todo lists, school assignments, etc.). How would this proposed Dropbox work? Would it just put a separate Dropbox folder in your Cloud Drive, separate from your music or whatever else you put directly into Cloud Drive? Or would you purchase Dropbox and then use all of your Cloud Drive for Dropbox? I think it would be weird to use Dropbox for all your music/photos/videos.
According to me Amazon Cloud Drive -- is targeting to the users who have data in cloud and want to get some better services around their data -- more towards the amazon services, this is good for people who use amazon services.
Dropbox do more then what Amazon Cloud Drive does --- it is more concentrated at data in your system and cloud storage as way to make it work.
Amazon CloudDrive is more on data at your cloud and Dropbox is a solution to the data at you system. I still use my system as my primary storage for my data -- for me Dropbox/IDrivesync make lot of value.
I believe I read somewhere here on HN that DropBox actually only stores a single version of a file. If you try to sync a file that someone else already has then you never really upload the file. Your dropbox just has a 'pointer' to the same file.
Seems like that would throw an interesting twist into the music/movie copyright battles. You could in theory upload and consume a lot of content that you never really 'uploaded'.
> I believe I read somewhere here on HN that DropBox actually only stores a single version of a file.
This is definitely true. For example, if you put a video show you got off of eztv in your dropbox, the upload is instantenously complete. Why? because someone else has already put that file into dropbox so you don't need to upload it as well.
I think it'd be fairly easy to put together a v1 quality script hosted on an AWS instance to do that, provided the subdomains have been pre-provisioned or you're ok with them all spinning up on a single instance.
Now that Amazon S3 provides Website Endpoints and index documents [1][2], it is probably fairly trivial to set this up either using an S3 sync tool, or an S3 mount such as ExpanDrive, without resorting to CloudDrive or EC2.
You would need to set-up CNAMES for your subdomains though, and it will not work with the primary (non-www.) domain.
It seems rather unlikely to me that people would pay dropbox for their syncing service to store things on someone else's paid storage. I would think that the dropbox software exists to drive people to their relatively high margin de-duplicated cloud storage subscriptions.
In a similar fashion it seems likely to me that Cloud Drive exists to drive adoption & volume to Amazon digital music, a market that dwarfs the size of the online storage game.