

Apple Said To Prepare ITunes Changes To Improve Sharing - rmah
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-27/apple-said-to-prepare-itunes-overhaul-improving-storage-sharing.html

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fluidcruft
I thought that Google's I/O demonstration of the Nexus Q was quite
interesting. You just tap your phone on the Nexus Q and then you can use your
phone to direct/stream any of your media for playback on that Nexus Q. For
example anyone at a party could tap their phone on the Q and then select their
own music to add to the playlist. Or if you're visiting a friend and want to
watch a movie or TV show together, just tap the Q with your phone and you can
then watch it on their TV without mucking with the DRM. It just works. I think
it would be very interesting to get this sort of thing into hotels. Tap your
phone and your Netflix queue shows up without all the login pain. Or send your
own photos/videos from Picasa/YouTube. It looks very liberating and has the
potential to make all the DRM pain go away.

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sjwright
Most of the demonstrated Nexus Q functionality has already existed on the
Apple side with AirPlay and Apple TV. It's a different take, and the Q
certainly has some interesting features, but it's not new, and the price is an
issue.

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fluidcruft
Well, that's pretty cool--I'm not much of an Apple user lately (iTunes not
available for any of my devices/OSs) but I don't think iPhones have NFC and
that's the part that I'm pretty impressed about. I guess I view streaming as a
solved problem, so that's not really what I'm impressed about.

What excites me more is I think Nexus Q is showing us how a future can work
where we're surrounded by networked displays and screens that we may or may
not own, but we can still get full use of just by being physically in front of
them. That's what I think is exciting. I can see the functionality of the
Nexus Q built into TVs in the future--just connect the TV to the internet and
touch your phone to it and boom, everything's set up without fussing with
passwords and accounts. Visit your parents, touch your phone to the TV and
boom it's as if it's your own TV.

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jsz0
I'm not really sure why they are even using NFC for the setup. All the
streaming is done over wifi anyway. I guess NFC could be used to reconfigure
the wifi as needed which could be useful in some cases where your streaming
target is on a different network.

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fluidcruft
No, it doesn't stream from the phone to the Nexus Q. It tells the Nexus Q
where to get it from the cloud. The NFC is a handshake based on physical
proximity to establish credentials for the Q to access the your cloud
ephemera. (wifi streaming may also be available as a feature, not sure)

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philip1209
Didn't they just remove Ping?

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Perceval
At WWDC they showed off more Facebook and Twitter integration with the new
Share button that's being implemented throughout the OS. My guess is that
iTunes will also get some form of the Share button, allowing you to post about
songs you like to Facebook or Twitter.

