“Google and Amazon.com, each recently unveiling virtual lockers for digital music, face big obstacles taking on Apple,” Martin Peers reports for The Wall Street Journal. “Most obviously, that’s because of its already dominant position through iTunes. Less obvious: Apple’s approach is potentially cheaper for consumers and much more lucrative for the company. Apple is effectively making a bet on the falling cost of flash memory, while the Google and Amazon efforts expose consumers to the rising cost of Internet bandwidth.”
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“Google’s and Amazon’s services involve users streaming content from cloud-based servers to their devices,” Peers reports. “But with wireless operators introducing usage-based pricing for data, frequent streaming could add to cellphone bills. AT&T’s wireless service, for instance, charges $25 a month for two gigabytes of data and $10 for each additional gigabyte.”
Peers reports, “Apple’s strategy, on the other hand, rests on consumers storing their content locally on their devices. Its new iCloud service allows consumers to easily sync their music collections to any of their Apple devices. Aside from the initial sync, a Web connection isn’t necessary.”
Read more in the full article here.
At what point in time will the graphs cross? Will the decline of NAND flash memory prices feed through into Apple products? It’s only Apple’s margins that are seeing the benefit. What price-benefit calculations will the consumer have to go through if hardware costs aren’t falling as fast as bandwidth caps are forcing prices up for Internet access.
Having said that uploading your entire music library to the cloud would be a time consuming exercise. Having your library accessible via Music Match and paying $25 seems to be worth the money if you have an excessively large library. But I usually just sync my iPod and change the playlists so Music Match does not serve my needs.
Google’s and Amazon’s solution is just a virtual hard drive all over again. I remember services from xdrive and idrive that offered free a free virtual hard drive. That’s all it is. This is just not convenient for music or other media. Spending hours uploading and downloading your own music is a wast of time. Music scan with iTunes Match eliminates all this. Apple makes everybody else look like retards.
Apple really did get this right, and I’m looking forward to using this. There are already (free) options for streaming your iTunes collection from home see AudioGalaxy, which works great over Wifi or 3G.
However, streaming doesn’t work so great without a connection. Apple’s method works much better when traveling or just when you have time away from home and want to create playlists.
So icloud mean we have data that is easily accessible but need to be downloaded to our idevice??
Hmm dont that defeat the purpose of a cloud system?
Surely we can stream music from icloud right?? Or stream videos??
If we need to download everytime don’t it defeat the purpose of always connected and cloud??
Loved the idea of wireless sync and new device sync.
But no streaming? Is that right??
iCloud works on a different principle than Music Match. iCloud’s purpose is to allow you to sync information across multiple devices, eg. from your iPhone to your Mac and vice versa.
Music Match is like a portable jukebox in the sky which alleviates the need for you to sync your music to your Mac because the theory is that the music that’s on your Mac will be on the cloud that is accessible by your iPhone by having it streamed to your device.
To what extent this will be a combination of streaming and songs downloaded to your device and buffered there depends on the speed of your Internet connection and the quality at which you need to listen to your music collection.
Its certainly true that the official definition of what constitutes “the cloud” is pretty muddled by now; and I’m not the one to lecture on it.
But I can definitely say that iCloud as its been presented is NOT a streaming service. Andy Ihnatko sagely nailed the metaphor: its not a destination, its a highway. It appears that you never see the cloud per se; your native apps do. Its plumbing, invisible but ever-present.
Remember, above all, Apple sells hardware; thus, they’re philosophically opposed to thin-clients and webapps. (I know I know, iPhoneOS originally was going to be based on webapps. They swiftly readjusted once they thought it through, hence the App Store).
When you think about it, this is the only interpretation of “the cloud” that would make sense to a company that make highly-profitable hw and wants to keep it that way.
And this model will probably be very successful precisely because, unlike all others, it doesn’t depend on the grid being up, or cheap. Whats the worse that happens if NC goes offline…your changes to a Pages doc on your pad don’t appear on your phone’s copy right away? Plus, the syncing only occurs in background when you happen to be swimming in wifi, so its a service that more akin to bg disk indexing.
There’s no support for video (yet), but Imagine if they don’t stream tunes, there’s no chance they’ll stream the more bandwidth hungry media. (So iTunes video won’t stream a la Netflix; interesting implications for AppleTV.)
BTW I think we’ll look back on iCloud as not just the biggest thing to come out of WWDC 2011, but as one of the biggest things to come out of Apple this decade. If it delivers on promises, the implications for how our use computing devices will change are staggering.
Zulfiki man, you are so confused!!!! I am not sure tech is for you.
Oh by the way you seem to use the “….defeats the purpose…” phrase all the time. Not just this post but all your posts seem to do this.
“Aside from the initial sync, a Web connection isn’t necessary.”
Until your second sync, and then the third, and then the fourth…..
Well sure, but after the fourth, you’re golden! 😉
That’s my position, too. I see it more as a cost drop of $75/yr.
I was wondering how they were going to take the pain out of the initial sync-up, especially for people with large media libraries that increasingly contains movies, TV shows, etc. (my music library is a moderate 3.3K tracks, which would take the better part of a day or three to sync.) Match is a clever solution all around.
I don’t think I’m giving away anything super secret when I say that Apple’s syncing is far more efficient, bandwidth wise, than either of the competitors. Google and Amazon requiring you to upload and download the entire document/song/etc. are typical.
When you use google docs the whole doc has to be downloaded each time. When you use numbers, only that which has changed is transferred, since there is a local copy. Google docs don’t keep a local copy.
I won’t be using it.
I currently use MobileMe mostly for iDisk, moving files between home & work. Will continue using it until this time next year.
Then goodbye, iClod
I see what you did there. Take away a letter and, bam, brilliance. Wish I were blessed with that kind of wit.
You’re not missing anything.
I’ve been doing a lot of think about iTunes match recently.
I’m especially intrigued by the way it will upgrade your low bitrate files.
What’s stopping someone from creating junk files, with the same tags as the real files, to be replaced by Apple with the real deal?
I’m sure they’ve thought about that already, and have some system in place that will scan for authenticity, but I’d like to know more about it.
The song matching is done by acoustic fingerprinting, so the song has to actually sound right (the name and tags don’t factor into it).
Steve Jobs must have so much power in Apple that he can single handedly change the direction of the company.
Imagine all of those ground breaking ideas juniors inside companies have come up with yet they never see the light of day cus those in the big seats cant see a good idea if they tripped over one.
iTunes Match (iTM) is a brilliant idea that finally allows music owners to make some money from pirated files. Music owners have tried to fight piracy with the hammer of legal action, but success has been very limited due to the overwhelming size of the problem.
Now, due to iTM, music owners will be able to get some return from piracy. Subscribers to iTM will pay $25 each, and in return, their pirated files will be replaced with higher-quality legitimate copies.
It’s a given that Apple will pay some kind of proportionate cut to the music owners from the $25 it gets from each subscriber. And in one fell swoop, Apple will enable music owners to earn something from the piracy of their work.
Taken on a per-file basis, music owners will probably make far, far less than they would have if the files had been bought legitimately in the first place. But the real choice here is between making nothing at all from piracy, or making something under the iTM system.
Some estimates have put the number of potential iCloud subscribers at 150 million. If only half of those subscribed to iTM, and if Apple paid just $1 for each of them to the music owners, the music owners would end up making $75 million – which is not a figure to pooh-pooh by any standard!
WAY more than $1 going to the labels. The advance payment to the 4 major label holders is no less than $100 million in total. Apple makes very little money off the sale of music to begin with. iCloud is just another value-added benefit of buying into the Apple ecosystem and iTunes Match is just a way to make that ecosystem even more attractive. Apple’s profit is primarily rom device sales.
Stop advertising your site like that, it’s annoying :/