
Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player - davidedicillo
http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=amb_link_355091782_4?ie=UTF8&node=2658409011&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1XCE7Q7BHQQA2C69H0SW&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1291940422&pf_rd_i=163856011
======
jkincaid
I think Amazon is trying to become the backbone for the 'alternative' set of
Android core apps that will inevitably be developed. These apps will appeal to
any carrier/OEM that wants to stop licensing from Google, or from companies
like Amazon and Facebook who may launch their own devices with splintered
versions of Android.

My guess is that Amazon will own content delivery for these devices (books,
movies, TV, music) and that Microsoft will round out the rest, with a Bing
Maps app and an email app that supports Gmail etc but syncs nicely with
Hotmail (which has been totally overhauled since you last tried it). This is
entirely a guess on my part, mind you.

~~~
jmatt
I think it's bold of Amazon to launch essentially a minimum viable product and
beat Apple to the punch. Now they have customers and are getting meaningful
feedback to make future improvements. You rarely see this outside of Apple and
startups. I'm glad to see Apple running into some real competition.

~~~
matthewslotkin
since when does Apple launch minimum viable products? that is the opposite of
what Apple does.

~~~
jmatt
Go look at all the complaining from when the iPhone original was announced and
came out. It didn't have a number of features that were considered at the time
required:

 _The original release of the operating system included Visual Voicemail,
multi-touch gestures, HTML email, Safari web browser, threaded text messaging,
and YouTube. However, many features like MMS, third-party apps, and copy and
paste were not supported at release. These missing features led to hackers
"jailbreaking" their phones which added these missing features. Official
software updates slowly added these features._

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(original)#Software_Hist...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_\(original\)#Software_History)

Looking back now they clearly did the right thing. In articles at the time
when journalists did a feature comparisons it lost. But when people and
journalists actually used it - it was awesome. I argue a product can be both a
MVC and have simple, powerful, useful, polished features. Just look at the
ipod and iphone (yeah similar reviews happened for ipod. See the infamous
Slashdot quote).

~~~
teej
There's a huge difference between an MVP and cutting features to reach
perfection.

~~~
mey
Another example is the 1st generation iPod. Did just enough to solidify market
share, then started evolving. You don't see people ooh and ahhing over a wheel
anymore now that we are firmly onto touch pads.

Edit: Another example is iTunes (why couldn't you buy things directly on your
device) or their office productivity suite.

------
MichaelEGR
Glad to see the comments flood in for this and see it hit #1 on HN so quickly
as I was beginning to wonder when it would ship. I was contracted to work on
the Amazon MP3 v2.0 app rearchitecting the download architecture and adding
cloud drive download support. It was "very interesting" being the only outside
contractor / software architect level dev to be hired by A2Z / Amazon to work
on core architecture for Amazon MP3. I finished my involvement mid-Feb. I
guess I'm just posting to get an account started here on HN as I'm launching
some very compelling Android platform / middleware soon called TyphonRT. I've
been bootstrapping for years and this recent Amazon MP3 contract has opened up
enough runway for me to launch my tech in the coming months. Hopefully I'll
have some more time to post in the future too.

------
slackerIII
If you want a free service to stream your music from your home computer to
your work computer/android/iOS device, check out my service:
<http://www.audiogalaxy.com>

Since we don't store the music in the cloud, we don't have any size limits
(the current winner has about 530,000 files). Obviously this only works if you
leave your home computer on, but we've found that isn't a problem for most
folks.

~~~
jonursenbach
Didn't Audiogalaxy used to be a P2P service in the early 00s?

~~~
slackerIII
It did. We are some of the same folks, but a totally different service now.

~~~
rbarooah
It was magnificent back then. I know it's not the same thing, but seeing the
logo and installing the new 'helper' gave me a good feeling.

------
jasonkester
This is actually a little bit worrying as an entrepreneur building things on
top of Amazon's Web Services.

Amazon has always made a point of not building services on top of its Cloud
offerings that directly compete with its users. Cloud Drive sets a precedent
for them as the first time they've gone against that principle.

There are lots of "low hanging fruit" companies that were built on the
understanding that Amazon wasn't interested in implementing that stuff
themselves. There's no debating that this will make Amazon a ton of money. It
remains to be seen, however, how much it will cost them in developer loyalty
and businesses that never get built because "If they did it to JungleDisk,
they'll do it to us".

~~~
swombat
I've said it before, I'll say it again:

( [http://swombat.com/2011/2/22/predictability-of-closed-
platfo...](http://swombat.com/2011/2/22/predictability-of-closed-platforms) )

> I would argue that only one thing is entirely predictable about closed
> platforms: they will do whatever is in the business's interest. When
> building your business on someone else's platform, you should always assume
> that if it is in the platform owner's interest, they will shut you down
> tomorrow with no warning.

> So, you need to do two things at the very least:

> 1\. Ensure your goals and the platform owner's goals are always in
> harmonious agreement.

> 2\. Have a backup plan for what happens if your access to the platform is
> revoked tomorrow.

> People seem to keep learning this lesson over and over again... with
> Facebook, with Twitter, and these days with Apple...

And these days, with Amazon?

~~~
tybris
I don't think that's quite comparable. Contrary to platforms like Google App
Engine or iOS, the core infrastructure AWS offers is sufficiently open and
commonplace that you wouldn't have such a hard time moving away from them in
the unlikely event that they'll throw you out. This is simply a case of a much
more classical business dilemma: a big company decides to build a product that
competes with your small company. The somewhat strange thing about this case
is that the big company is also providing the infrastructure for your small
company so they win regardless of whichever product wins, but not at the cost
of the small company's ability to build a better product.

~~~
Someone
The other side of that coin is that, if it is easy to move somewhere else,
Amazon does not have that special of a product. If that is the case, how are
they going to compete? Both price and quality are options, but even those are
forms of lock-in, if they keep customers in-house.

------
wheels
I think there are two really interesting things about this:

• This is the first time Amazon has pulled together the two major branches of
their business, retail and cloud infrastructure, into something (dare I say
it?) synergetic.

• Amazon is taking the first steps into the non-retail consumer web, where, if
successful, they'll probably give a good scare to a handful of startups as
they sweep across segments (and without the Google / Facebook-like startup
shopping).

~~~
jrockway
Not necessarily true, really. When you save your current location on a Kindle,
that's handled by an app running on EC2. That's just an example: I am sure
pretty much all of Amazon's products use the AWS infrastructure.

~~~
edanm
That's what AWS was developed for originally - running Amazon's products.

~~~
OstiaAntica
Actually, that is sort of a myth. AWS was built independently of the core
Amazon.com platform and specifically for the cloud marketplace.

~~~
edanm
Interesting.

I'm pretty sure I heard that in a talk on AWS given by an Amazon product
manager, but I could be wrong (or he could be wrong).

------
itsnotvalid
As a non-US there is no way for me to use this.

Just put aside that, is it actually any legal reason for using things like
dropbox to upload music purchased and streamed for private uses?

BTW that one album/20GB offers only last until the end of the year, and it
only last for a year. After that, you would have the habit of using the
service but be reverted to the free plan.

However since all the new purchases on amazon are automatically saved without
counting towards the quota, I guess that solves the problem for many android
users. Just that I don't listen to many of bands/artists that put their songs
on Amazon MP3 may make this offer less appealing.

~~~
jbarham
> As a non-US there is no way for me to use this.

I'm in Australia and that's what it looked like to me initially too, but after
manually uploading an MP3 and then attempting to play it, the Cloud Player
then worked.

~~~
studioprisoner
I'm in Australia too, and this didn't work. Was really looking forward to
using it to store my music online to play anywhere.

Uploaded an mp3 manually and tried to play, but got the warning of being
outside the US :(

------
kin
Wow, Amazon is doing all kinds of great things for Android. First Amazon's
Android App store with the awesome Test Drive feature and now this!

------
DonnyV
Amazon's storage plans are expensive compared to Google's

Amazon

5 GB (FREE)

20 GB ($20 / year)

50 GB ($50 / year)

100 GB ($100 / year)

200 GB ($200 / year)

500 GB ($500 / year)

1000 GB ($1000 / year)

Google

20 GB ($5.00 USD per year)

80 GB ($20.00 USD per year)

200 GB ($50.00 USD per year)

400 GB ($100.00 USD per year)

1 TB ($256.00 USD per year)

~~~
dfran02
I happened to download an album from the Amazon mp3 Android app and they are
giving me 20 GB for free for a year. If I don't upgrade (start paying) they'll
revert me to the 5GB plan after the year is up.

------
dchest
"The 5 GB free storage plan is available to all Amazon.com customers, however
further upgrades to the storage plan are currently unavailable in the
following countries: Austria , Belgium , Bulgaria , Cyprus , Czech Republic ,
Denmark , Estonia , Finland , France , Germany , Greece , Hungary , Ireland ,
Italy , Latvia , Lithuania , Luxembourg , Malta , Netherlands , Poland ,
Portugal , Romania , Slovakia , Slovenia , Spain , Sweden , United Kingdom"

Very strange, why is that?

~~~
relix
I know that in Belgium there is a law where storage which can be used to play
pirated media has a surcharge that is used to compensate authors for the
possible loss of income because of the potential pirating.

Maybe this is a European directive and enforced in all of those countries, and
they need to figure out how they're going to approach this law.

------
pkulak
Streaming seems a bit silly when I've got 16 gigs sitting empty on my phone. I
just want synching. I'll use Pandora if I want to stream. And then I'm not
restricted to just my library.

~~~
roc
I'd be very surprised if this isn't step 1 to a whole-phone-data-sync
solution. Media, Data, third party app API -- the whole shebang.

~~~
hyperbovine
I think the hype has raced ahead of the technology here. "Streaming
everything" on today's smartphones seems to give you about 2 hrs of battery
life, a problem for which there does not appear to be a near-term solution.
Moreover, no wireless network in America could support that mode of usage on a
large scale, and that will also be true for the foreseeable future. Or so it
seems to me -- anyone in the know care to comment?

~~~
roc
I wouldn't imagine "streaming everything" is the way to interpret this.

Think of it more like Dropbox-style-sync for your whole phone (likely
configurable to only happen when in wifi), plus the option to stream if you
really want.

The average user will be using the wifi-sync by default without even realizing
it and probably never even consider streaming all their music.

------
dstein64
I tried uploading a file to the cloud drive using Chrome, and then I viewed
the file. I copied the URL and pasted it into Firefox, where I was not logged
in to amazon.com or their cloud storage. It still loaded the file. If you
tried doing this with a gmail message, gmail would prompt you to log in. I am
not too familiar with cloud storage. Is this a security issue?

~~~
dchest
It didn't work for me:

    
    
      SignatureDoesNotMatch
      
      The request signature we calculated does not match the signature you provided.

~~~
dstein64
The first time I tried it, I used a PDF file, since it opens in the browser
and I could easily access the URL. I just tried again, and I was able to
replicate the issue I mentioned, this time using Chrome and Internet Explorer.
I tried uploading a different file type (a simple text file) that also loads
in the browser, and I was able to replicate with that file as well.

------
baddox
Free persistent storage of Amazon digital downloads is the big feature here
(to me). I've always thought it was insane how Steam lets you download dozens
of gigabytes of video games _ad infinitum_ , yet Apple's and Amazon's music
stores require you to backup your digital purchases.

------
jfeldstein2
There's an "upload your own mp3's" feature. I think this means I can stop
waiting for google music.

Except:

> You have 5.0 GB of Cloud Drive storage. Upload your entire music collection.

I don't think this is going to work...

------
jambo
Can anyone see AmazonMP3 tracks in their library? I've purchased tons of music
from AmazonMP3, and Cloud Player shows an empty library & 0 purchased songs.
It seems like a big miss to launch this way. Hopefully it's just a bug.

~~~
wmf
I don't think it's a bug; the site is pretty carefully worded. For whatever
reason, sideloading from the MP3 store is not retroactive.

~~~
jambo
If that's the case, I'd bet it's for license reasons. An AmazonMP3 purchase
made after Cloud Drive is launched could be described as having been copied
for personal use, at the time of purchase, to your Cloud Drive.

Allowing previously purchased tracks to be streamed without first uploading
them looks more like what Lala was doing, and they had to negotiate streaming
licenses. Though I'd wonder if there is any real implementation difference in
Amazon's case.

~~~
vessenes
Bingo. They encourage you to upload your Amazon MP3's directly throughout the
launch site. This is a licensing issue.

------
tzury
I suspect this 5GB quote is a "fake", since there is no need to actually
"copy" a song to the User's virtual drive, rather add a pointer to a copy
already available on their platform, that is, if 1M users are buying a popular
song, there is no need to clone this song million times, right?

Having said that, since there are smart people working on this platform on
amazon, I am sure they don't make a physical clone, which raises the question
already mentioned above, why limit to 5GB?

~~~
MatthewPhillips
There is no cap on music purchased from Amazon MP3 (going forward). The cap is
on uploaded files, since there is no way to link your uploaded copy of Bad
Romance with my uploaded copy of Bad Romance and know that they are the same.

~~~
podperson
Surely there is in fact a way, at least much of the time. In general, I assume
encoding a digitized song with a given codec and quality settings is
deterministic, so the files have some chance of being identical. Next, if the
track were identified using a common process (e.g. CDDB) it might easily be
possible to identify them as being identical in origin and then perform some
tests to see if they are in fact identical and convert one into a pointer to
the other.

~~~
tzury
hash is the right (and only) way to do this.

~~~
podperson
My suggested approach assumes hash as a baseline approach (identify actually
identical files -- which DropBox is apparently already doing) and goes beyond
this (identify files that are identical in source and intent, but different
owing to random trivial errors).

------
ffumarola
The 20gb free for purchasing an album makes this a pretty clutch deal.

They don't compete with dropbox's sync functionality, but they sure do on
price and the mp3 cloud player!

~~~
unfletch
In case you missed it in Amazon's terms, the free upgrade is temporary. It
expires in a year, at which point you can start paying or be bumped back down
to the free level.

    
    
        ...you will be automatically eligible for the 20 GB plan for one year from
        the date of your MP3 album purchase. Unless you set your account to auto-renew
        to a paid plan, the 20 GB plan will revert to a free plan one year from the
        date of your MP3 album purchase.
    

From
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?ie=UTF8&docId=100...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?ie=UTF8&docId=1000667531)

~~~
gfodor
I doubt this will stick. The reason is because ultimately that means Amazon
will be put in a position to delete peoples' files (if they fail to pay for
their 20GB that month it reverts.) That could lead to lawsuits etc, probably
not worth the chump change they'll save by revertting those plans.

~~~
lftl
Maybe they'll just render some random portion of the files inaccessible unless
you pay up? Or just make your account read-only until you clear out enough of
the files. Plenty of ways to handle it without wholesale deletion.

------
twodayslate
They fact that they are going to start backing up the Amazon MP3s is great
news. Previously it was impossible to redownload a track once you have already
downloaded it. Luckily I did not lose to much music when I got a new computer
since I had a personal backup.

I would love Amazon Cloud Drive to have desktop integration like Dropbox.

Doesn't google have a cloud service now? It just doesn't have a pretty GUI or
desktop integration?

------
dotBen
The music aspect of this makes a great headline - and also great case for why
the avg joe consumer should want all this cloud storage.

But for me the real story here is the ability to store any file or document,
and aggressive prices of bigger storage tiers.

Dropbox's prices have always seemed unreasonably high to me - and I'm tempted
to move all my personal docs over to Amazon and use DropBox just for social
sharing.

~~~
cma
Dropbox's prices are cheap, but only when you consider how many free plans you
are subsidizing.

------
getpost
The OS X uploader requires installation of Adobe AIR. Adobe bloatware? Another
piece of software checking for updates? Another piece of software that needs
to be updated? No thank you. I'm all for getting a product out the door, but
is a native OS X app that much trouble for an organization like Amazon? Does
this bother anyone else, or is it just me?

------
JabavuAdams
Is using the term "cloud" a branding / marketing mistake?

The cloud is generic and multi-vendor. It's a utility. This angle makes sense
when talking to developers.

OTOH, I could see a lot of users being confused because they put stuff "in the
cloud", but they can't get it back (from another vendor i.e. different cloud).

~~~
technomancy
> The cloud is generic and multi-vendor. It's a utility. This angle makes
> sense when talking to developers.

I just set my dad up with SFTP on a dreamhost account, and he keeps calling it
his "cloud storage" account. I think beyond the developer world it's starting
to just mean "I don't have to back it up, and I can reach it from anywhere."

~~~
JabavuAdams
Well, my points were:

1) Vendor-centric: It's a missed opportunity for Dreamhost, because your Dad
won't think of their brand.

2) User-centric: What happens when he has two "cloud" accounts from different
vendors? Will he expect them to work together?

------
forgotAgain
It's becoming clear that the main competitor for iPad will come from Amazon.
Apple will not be beat by a competitor on look and feel. Anyone who wants to
compete with them will need to find their own area of strength. Amazon's
strength is its years of experience with Amazon Web Services.

~~~
ctdonath
Recall the article opining that Amazon will be giving away Kindles to Prime
members by November 2011 (so far, price drops are on a straight line to $0
then, and when asked Bezos said "oh, you noticed?" and smiled). Maybe they are
gearing up for an iPad-type model, laying the groundwork for users buying into
disparate parts (streaming video, cloud storage, ebooks, etc.) so when the
convergence arrives millions of customers will find themselves already living
a ubiquitous Amazon life.

------
joseakle
How long until someone posts their username(s) and password(s) to their whole
music collection(s) ....

~~~
jambo
You agree not to do that, and Amazon has your real name if you've ever made a
purchase &| uploaded >5gigs of music. Most people I know use their Amazon
account for other purchases and won't risk their account being closed for
violating the terms.

[edited for clarity]

~~~
MichaelEGR
Yeah account sharing is watched and when detected the suspect account will get
flagged for a TOS violation. I can't tell you how quickly the ban hammer may
come down as things go, but 2 devices is likely not going to trigger it.

------
dbjacobs
Storage cost is $1/yr/GB which is similar to Amazon's S3 reduced redundancy
storage. It is unclear which level of reliability Amazon is promising for the
cloud drive. If it is the higher level, it is a good deal.

~~~
amock
If you use enough bandwidth it's a good deal even for the reduced redundancy
storage. Only having a web interface makes it a lot less simple than Dropbox,
though.

~~~
adpowers
I'm uploading a ton of photos to test it out, then I'll delete them all. For
free!

PS: Sorry for hogging your upstream Alan.

------
justanotheratom
Just checking, did Ray Ozzie join Amazon?

~~~
tybris
I'm sure they would love to have him, but they've always been 5 years ahead of
whatever Ray Ozzie did.

------
jazzychad
on ubuntu desktop: "The Amazon MP3 Uploader only supports Microsoft Windows
(XP, Vista, 7) or Mac OS X running on Intel-based hardware."

yet the normal clouddrive uploader works. weird.

~~~
TREYisRAD
The MP3 uploader seems to look for and scan an iTunes directory for music.
Linux's lack of iTunes could be the issue.

edit: It also imports playlists, etc.

------
ajg1977
I wonder if they're doing anything clever to reduce storage size. For example
- an MP3/AAC song purchased from the same service has a small unique header
(e.g. where your iTunes account name is stored) and then identical music data.

I imagine the music companies would have a hissy fit and demand streaming
payments if that was the case though.

~~~
trotsky
In my mind there is no question that they'll be doing de-duplication here. You
don't need to rely on a header key, you just take something like a sha1 hash
and the size. Services like dropbox do this - even making it so you don't have
to upload non-unique files. I have always assumed that all of the non-
encrypted remote backup solutions that live on s3 or elsewhere do this too.
It's just too easy for a massive storage space savings to not do it.

------
jasonkester
It's surprising that their player doesn't work in Mobile Safari. On my iPod
touch, I can load the page and see my music (though it helpfully tells me I
should upgrade to IE), but nothing will play.

I notice that they used Flash for the uploader. Surely they wouldn't have used
it as the only option for the player.

Strange.

------
josh33
Is an iPhone app against the iOS T's&C's?

~~~
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).

~~~
unfletch
It actually looks like they could make the web-based UI work in Mobile Safari
without _too_ much work. (Easy for me to say.) The UI renders perfectly
already. As far as I can tell, playback is the only thing that doesn't work.
(But if you "download" a track it'll open in the built-in quicktime player and
start playing.)

Despite the Flash requirement for uploading, they're already doing non-Flash
playback. I don't have Flash installed on my desktop and playback works great.

Seeing as Safari has had background audio support since before it was granted
to third-party apps, the web UI would be a decent stopgap in lieu if a native
iOS app.

Here's hoping it's just a bug!

~~~
trotsky
In a recent article about html5 audio there was a lot of talk about how safari
intentionally didn't support automatic audio playback (vs. say chrome and
chrome lite). I'm guessing that this would mean you'd have to click a button
each time the song changed in your playlist - this would probably suck enough
that it explains why they didn't launch with mobile safari support.

~~~
unfletch
Damn, you're right. I'd played around with Cloud Player a bit last night in
Safari/Mac, but I guess I never let it play two songs in a row. I just tried
to play an album and it stopped after the first song.

------
jimmydo
It doesn't seem like they currently do this, but it would be great if Amazon
applied file de-duplication (like Dropbox) to at least music files. If I'm
trying to upload a song that Amazon already has on its own servers, it should
just use that copy instead of uploading a new copy from my computer.

~~~
trotsky
MP3.com once got in a ton of hot water for a version of that. They had an
integrated ripping system that if they already had the content it just checked
the "hash" of the TOC and granted you access to the music. In this way you
could borrow a stack of cds and very quickly have access to all of your
friends music.

I'm not sure if having to upload your music before it's de-duplicated makes a
legal difference, but I bet it came into play. I have long thought of the
possibility of hacking up the dropbox binary to fake hashes of known music I
didn't have and get access instantly

 _Judge Jed S. Rakoff, in the case UMG v. MP3.com, ruled in favor of the
record labels against MP3.com and the service on the copyright law provision
of "making mechanical copies for commercial use without permission from the
copyright owner." Before damage was awarded, MP3.com settled with plaintiff,
UMG Recordings, for $53.4 million, in exchange for the latter's permission to
use its entire music collection._

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/MP3.com#My.MP...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/MP3.com#My.MP3.com)

------
oskee80
What happens if your phone is in a poor reception area, or without internet
connection? Then you can't listen to music? Can the app manage which songs
you'd also like to have stored locally on the phone?

Is this meant to supplement your old ways of syncing music to the phone or
replace it?

------
jorgeleo
I like this... But I would like ti more if there is a webdav address to access
the storage from my iPad. I know that there are other solutions, but 5GB
free...

Does anybody knows how to access Amazon Cloud Drive using Webdab?

------
tuhin
Why would one not prefer to use <http://droptun.es/>.

Is it the added meta info about music and other things that Amazon can use
since it has a huge collection of music?

~~~
kin
That and the Cloud Player can be accessed on Android devices. Meta info wins
me over. It's frustrating to see inconsistent meta tags on things like
Grooveshark.

------
misterkeeter
It feels like amazon is slowly dismantling the advantages of other content
services. It's now competing head to head with one or several other companies
within each media space.

------
jbarham
How's that North Carolina data center coming along, Apple?! ;)

------
mone
Am I missing something or is Amazon (Cloud Drive) not giving the ability to
import songs purchased from Amazon prior to this date??

------
jongraehl
No drag and drop (in Chrome). Slow and clumsy. Dropbox has a far better user
experience (but more expensive storage).

------
markgx
It would be interesting to see if they expand the scope of Cloud Drive to
include Dropbox-like syncing.

------
IgorPartola
And yet another service that does not support Ubuntu... Ubuntu One just might
get my money after all.

------
pilom
This page crashes my computer. Not just IE7, my whole computer. Any idea what
may be causing it?

------
suprgeek
I wonder how telling this is: "We do not guarantee that Your Files will not be
subject to misappropriation, loss or damage and we will not be liable if they
are. You're responsible for maintaining appropriate security, protection and
backup of Your Files." Is it "use at your own risk no matter how much money
you pay us"?

~~~
wmf
Consumer services don't have SLAs. They just don't.

------
naithemilkman
Am I correct to say that this is essentially a web based version of iTunes?

~~~
ctdonath
Insofar as the iPad is essentially an MP3 player, yes.

~~~
naithemilkman
I don't get your example? You cite one use of the iPad and compared it to my
statement. So this means I'm looking at it too narrowly? Elaborate please?

~~~
ctdonath
You cite one use of Amazon Cloud Drive, which I compared to. Yes, the point
was to illustrate you're looking at it too narrowly.

To elaborate: Yes, Amazon Cloud Drive can act like iTunes, insofar as you buy
tracks from Amazon and can play them thru a browser via the MP3 player. No
question Amazon will, like Apple & iTunes, expand this ability by using this
"cloud drive" as the focal point for an assortment of applications, now that
Amazon is in the e-book, e-movie, e-music, etc. business. I expect the Kindle
will start using this in both overt and covert fashion. As Amazon observes
what people use their "cloud drive" for, they will provide matching services
to enhance and lock-in use thereof. The intent is to make this a disruptive
product: its full potential may be unclear, but it's the groundwork for new
ways of doing things - and new ways for Amazon to make money.

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naithemilkman
I guess I was looking at it from a point of view of 'what it is now'. A kind
of dropbox+iTunes mashup.

You're coming from a 'what it could be' which is at best guess in your own
words, unclear. Right now they are using music as a beach head into the
market. In future it could be something video or word processing related.

Is that what you're trying to say?

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ctdonath
Yes. You don't give away a million 5GB cloud "drives" for free without some
plan to leverage it beyond mere paying for more storage. The model may work
for Dropbox, but Amazon has bigger plans.

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naithemilkman
Yeah I definitely see your point now. Thanks for replying.

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frsandstone
Do we know the bitrate of the stream?

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sandipc
how long until Dropbox makes a full-featured Cloud Player of their own?

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zzleeper
Won't happen, as long as their costs are at least as higher as amazon's

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ammmir
is there an S3-like (or simplified) API for this service?

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jonursenbach
Not at launch.

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ditojim
can you export from their cloud drive?

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marklabedz
Yes - they provide download capability, however it's at the individual file
level only right now.

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ditojim
hopefully they add the ability to bulk export. otherwise, you are semi-locked
into this cloud music solution. what happens when a better/cheaper service
comes out and you need to move your music?

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is_computer_on
Would be great if it wasn't illegal to actually upload your music collection
on there. I doubt that when you bought your music you got the right to
distribute it to a third party which means uploading it onto Amazon's servers
would constitute copyright infringement. Songs bought from Amazon probably
come with a license that allows you to upload it to Amazon Cloud Player now,
but with the music you already own and Music you buy somewhere else you're out
of luck.

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die_sekte
The laptop is a HP Envy running a full-screen OS X Firefox. Man. Seems most
designers can't fake a realistic chrome for web pages.

