
Amazon Cloud Player goes live, streams music on your computer and Android - profitbaron
http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/29/amazon-cloud-player-goes-live-streams-music-on-your-computer-an/
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vessenes
Timing matters so much.

There were definitely companies that had exactly this business model in 1999.
They were sued into oblivion. Well, I suppose they kept one copy of the files
for streaming back, as opposed to one copy per person.

I doubt very much that Amazon will be sued by the RIAA over this, though.
Timing and giant lawyer posses. The stuff business empires are made of..

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ryanwatkins
And the point about the former services keeping a single copy and this one
keeping one per person. I'm sure thats a key distinction. The former services
like mp3.com were not positioned so much as "upload your mp3's here" but "put
your CD in the drive to prove you have the rights" which gets tricky.

Which brings the point about how they're offering Amazon purchased MP3s stored
for free. Wonder if for these they are keeping a single copy or actually
duplicating them. And potential issues there ...

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Someone
With the right choice of filesystem (i.e. One that does block-level
deduplication) 'duplicating' the files is as good as free.

If Amazon were small and unknown, lawyers could have a field day on that. I
think what is more important here is that Amazon has a good relation with
content providers. They bring in money, and help them keep power against the
iTunes store.

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vessenes
Exactly; this is a follow-on play, not a startup play. In other words, the
world had to wait around for a big company to do this business.

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YooLi
Lack of an iOS player is interesting. I don't see a technical reason why
Amazon couldn't make one. Ditto with an iOS video player for Amazon Video-on-
Demand. Not making either of those (plus the Amazon Appstore & Kindle) makes
me think Amazon is working on an Android platform of their own. They have the
capabilities for a pretty solid media-ecosystem (music, video, apps, books,
etc).

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lambda
There's the possibility that Apple simply wouldn't allow the player at all,
and if they did, Apple would take a 30% cut of all in-app purchases. Amazon
may not be able to sell music with Apple taking a 30% cut, since they likely
have contractual obligations to pay a certain percentage for their music.

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groby_b
Most important part to notice here: Amazon just told everybody loud and clear
that you can't rely on S3/EC2 as a critical infrastructure piece - they
undercut every single storage provider relying on S3, pricing-wise.

You are still good if you offer _significant_ value-add over base services
since it's expensive to replicate that, but basic storage/compute services
don't look so good.

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bdonlan
They don't offer an API for this cloud files service and the ToS clearly
restricts it to personal use. They may be positioning it as a loss leader (or
at least with slimmer margins than S3 normally has) in order to drive sales to
Amazon MP3 - or they may be doing deduplication internally to reduce costs.
Whatever the case, the fact that Amazon can undercut S3's prices doesn't
really say anything bad about S3 itself - it just means you've got to consider
if you can beat Amazon Cloud Drive's pricing while still using S3 as a
backend.

Oh, and google docs has been offering storage for 25% of the Amazon Cloud
Drive pricing for ages now. It's just as inconvenient to use for bulk storage
or backups, of course.

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paulridden
Depends what you use to access it. I'm using Google Docs with SMEStorage and
they enable me to upload / download files to Google Docs using FTP - makes it
easy....

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nowarninglabel
A bit disappointed that the MP3 uploader doesn't support Linux, and that I
can't just import all my previously purchased Amazon MP3s. Seems like a nice
feature though.

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avolcano
It's Adobe AIR, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was a Linux client soon.
It's not that much more functionality than manually uploading folders through
CloudDrive though.

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avolcano
I kind of wonder: do people really have the kind of data plans that can take
advantage of this?

Maybe it's because I'm stuck with my AT&T two gig/month plan, and I don't
personally know anyone with an unlimited plan that wasn't grandfathered into
it, but I have to imagine there's a lot of people with lower-end data plans
who couldn't use something like this. I wonder if the Amazon player has, say,
a bitrate option to help people use less data, but I would be surprised if it
did.

Everyone's talking about moving data into the cloud and assuming that everyone
has a high or unlimited data plan, when, in my personal experience, very few
people do.

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warp
I experimented with listening to internet radio on the commute to work about a
year ago. I used about 500Mbyte/month with that setup. The stations I listened
to were 128kbyte/s IIRC, so perhaps my usage would be about 1 Gbyte/month now.

That is more than my data plan, so I wouldn't be able to use it all the
time... perhaps useful as a backup for those moments you're not in the mood
for anything you have stored on the device itself.

The main problem for me was that the 3G in public transport wasn't reliable
enough -- if this cloud player does enough buffering I could probably use it.

edit: note that all consumer data plans in .nl are more or less identical: EUR
10/month on top of your regular phone plan gets you an "unlimited" data plan
(which have a fair use policy limit of about 800Mbyte/month currently).

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balakk
For U.S. Customers Only :(

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ChrisFulstow
Works for me in Australia with a UK Amazon account :)

