With the launch of Amazon Cloud Drive on Tuesday, Amazon has an upper hand over Google and Apple in this line. Amazon Cloud Drive is an Internet service that lets customers store music and other digital files on the company's servers and access them on computers, smartphones and other devices. It will give customers 5GB of Cloud Drive storage for free, and if users buy an MP3 album through Amazon, they'll be upgraded to 20GB of cloud storage for a year. The Cloud Player works on PCs, Macs and Android devices.
With this move, Amazon is officially to the cloud with music -- beating Apple and Google's years-long attempts to do the same. The main reason for these two IT giants to fall short in this race is the wait for record labels to get on board with licensing agreements, while Amazon skipped these and simply took the plunge.
Its quite clear that Cloud music services are still in grey area when we talk legal. Music licensing rules are arcane, and labels don't yet know how to handle the cloud. The reason behind this is the technology evolves faster than business models and their licensing services. We have lots of live example, due to the simpler licensing services, Spotify-music streaming services have grown rapidly in Europe while it cant get success in US.
With this move, Amazon is officially to the cloud with music -- beating Apple and Google's years-long attempts to do the same. The main reason for these two IT giants to fall short in this race is the wait for record labels to get on board with licensing agreements, while Amazon skipped these and simply took the plunge.
Its quite clear that Cloud music services are still in grey area when we talk legal. Music licensing rules are arcane, and labels don't yet know how to handle the cloud. The reason behind this is the technology evolves faster than business models and their licensing services. We have lots of live example, due to the simpler licensing services, Spotify-music streaming services have grown rapidly in Europe while it cant get success in US.
Comparing on small scale and just on the basis of space to store files no doubt microsoft's skydrive is better but it does have a few downsides: first, there is no way to expand it beyond that free 25 GB (other than by opening another Hotmail account to get another 25 gigs); and second, the actual files that you can store on Skydrive are limited to 50 MB in size, which is rather puny – but that's how they can afford to give away so much storage. Amazon's limit is 2 GB per file, which is better than you will get from Google or Microsoft. If you're using the commercial Box.net service, you have to upgrade to the paid Business account to be able to store gigabyte-sized files, and that will run you $15/month. So for videographers or others who need to store huge files cheaply, Amazon should be your first place to try out.
ReplyDelete