from TechCrunch:
Cloud Drive is the name Amazon is giving to its media storage space on their servers. They give you 5 GB of storage for free and allow you to access the media from any computer. Cloud Player is the name of yes, the actual player. And it comes in two flavors: a player for theweb, and one for Android devices. You’ll note an absence of an iOS player…
A bit more:
- Any album bought through Amazon MP3 is stored for free in your Cloud Drive — a very nice perk.
- If you buy one album from Amazon MP3, they’ll upgrade your Cloud Drive storage to 20 GB for free for a year — another nice perk.
- Normally, 20 GB of Drive storage will cost $20 for a year. 50 GB is $50. 100 GB is $100. And so on. All the way up to 1 TB for $1,000.
- The Cloud Drive storage isn’t just for music — Amazon notes that 1 TB will hold 70 hours of HD video.
- Other files can be uploaded — this includes music, movies, photos, and even documents.
- The MP3 uploader accepts MP3 or AAC files, but they must be DRM-free (.wma, .wav, .ogg and others are not supported)
Am I missing something here? Doesn’t everyone in the world have an iPod / iPhone now? Don’t we all own a pair of headphones? Don’t we all have portable thumb drives that fit in our pockets to carry around this music?
Why would I pay an annual “tax” for music that’s accessible “anywhere” when I have 64 gigabytes of music in my pocket and another terabyte of music in a hard drive that I can throw in a suitcase? Man, those checked bag fees are getting pricey! I can’t even bring my iPod on trips anymore.
Tons of guys have tried to sell me on Lala but what’s the point? I use Pandora when I’m looking for diversity while at work or at home but I have an iPhone with me at all times and usually just plug into that. Don’t argue that you can’t keep everything on your iPod and need Amazon because for me to keep “everything” on Amazon Cloud Player, I’d need the $1,000 a year package and spend about 6 weeks uploading to it to get going.
Sigh.
This is exciting to early adopters and people who want to get rid of personal storage that they own. Us “old men” who still love an array of hard drives at home and using Cloud services to backup the important stuff don’t see this as moving forward at all. My 1TB hard drive cost $150 (one time fee) and I can carry it anywhere I want even when there is no Internet connection like an airport or bus ride. It’s always on and very reliable and, if it crashes, I have a backup of that data at home.
I guess consumers like this stuff? I have no idea. Who is this for?