icloud

Showing 15 posts tagged icloud

iTunes Movies In The Cloud

Apple wants users to be able to stream films they buy through the cloud to any iOS device. No surprise there, this is exactly what they just unveiled for music and television shows. But it sounds like Hollywood wants something in return: Apple to play nicely with UltraViolet — their shitty name for a new form of DRM.

Put simply: UltraViolet will not work without Apple on board. As the LA Times notes, iTunes accounts for 66% of online movie sales and rentals. But the key isn’t iTunes, it’s the iOS devices. If Hollywood can’t get UltraViolet to work on them, the effort is dead in the water.

In my view, Apple has all the leverage here. But having worked in Hollywood for a few years, I’m also positive that they’re too stupid to realize that. The likelihood they fuck this up is high.

Welcome To The Cloud, Time To Die

Maybe I’m missing something here. Reading this over, Scott Hanselman’s password was clearly hacked. He doesn’t seem to think that’s the case because he’s cautious, but I’m going to go with Occam’s Razor here. 

Apple prompts you for your password when buying apps and when doing in-app purchases. Someone would have had to both know your Apple ID and enter that password, unless there’s some in-app exploit, but he doesn’t seem to be suggesting that.

But what Hanselman, who happens to work for Microsoft, seems most upset about is that Apple sent him a email warning him of strange activity on his account, but worded it in a way he didn’t like. And then they locked down his account with wording he didn’t like. And they made him go through iTunes to double-check his activity.

And he doesn’t like that Apple knows what device he has, but let the download happen anyway. I mean, people buy new devices all the time. What’s the proposed solution here? The perpetrators clearly had the correct Apple ID and password. I’m not sure what you can do to protect against that. Kill the cloud?

Update: Matt Galligan brings up a great point below. Apple also prompts you for your credit card’s security code on new devices.

Update 2: John Gruber notes that since Hanselmen was using a PayPal account, the credit card security code wasn’t in play.

"A Stepping Stone To The Cloud Age"

What I wrote a year ago about why I thought the then-new Apple TV made sense:

And on-demand is the big key to all of this. All of this content is going to move to the cloud. It has to for storage purposes and given how many devices we all have. Rentals just completely made the jump, but eventually purchases will too. At first, you’ll have the option to download certain movies you’ve bought to take on the go, but when you’re at your home, even movies you “own” will be streamed — they’ll simply be streamed for free. And then one day, all of this stuff will be in the cloud entirely as mobile devices will always be connected by high-speed wireless.

This is the future. It’s Apple’s future along with everyone else’s. This Apple TV is one small step in that direction, and at $99 it makes sense for now — at $229, it never did. This is a stepping stone to the cloud age. Right now it’s a mixture of the internal cloud (streaming from within your house) with the external cloud (streaming rentals from the cloud). Soon it will all be external.

That’s all sounding pretty good today. What I like most about the new iCloud-powered TV content is just how well it works. I just bought a season of The Wire on my Apple TV. I’ll simply grab it from the cloud when I want to watch it — from any device. 

Do you think Apple isn't offering streaming with iTunes/iCloud for contractual reasons with the labels or because they want to control the user experience and instances of lack of connectivity would make music playback experience unpredictable?

Asked by nickreynolds

I’m really not sure. I would guess that it’s a combination of the two things, but perhaps a bit more about the contracts.

It would certainly seem that streaming from the cloud requires different rights than downloading — which Apple has obviously had for a while. The deal they cut may have just been a slightly modified version of the existing one. Streaming may have meant more drastic changes (and may have taken longer to get done). How do you control the number of devices that way, for example?

Just some thoughts off the top of my head, not based on any type of inside information. 

The Web And The Other Web

Joshua Topolsky on the transition from MobileMe to iCloud:

That means that when the cutoff date of June 30, 2012 comes around for users, the web-based email client, calendar, contacts app, and other components of the web suite will cease to exist. You will no longer be able to log in and check your mail through a browser, change calendar events, or edit contacts.

For what it’s worth, I’ve heard this will not be the case.

While Apple absolutely is thinking native app-first with iCloud, there will still be a web presence. In fact, the apps found at me.com should be ported to the new system — I just don’t think Apple is ready to talk about it yet (the transition is far off), which is why it wasn’t brought up at all.

Think about it: Apple just spent a lot of time recently redesigning the me.com web apps. And they’re very good. Why scrap them when they will be useful to people on the go who simply don’t have their devices with them or can’t access them for some reason (like if they’re abroad and don’t want to pay crazy fees)?

Again, there is no doubt that Apple is pushing native over the what most of us consider to be the web today — that is, HTML rendered in a browser. But Apple is making the case that the magic going on behind these scenes to link their native apps is still the web. And they’re right.

And the real case they’re making is that front-end web apps still cannot compete with native apps. And they’re also right there. For now.

You know who else agrees? Google. That’s why Android exists. 

Microsoft: Wait, Wait, Look Over Here! Please!

The first of about 100,000 “me too” or “we were doing this a long time ago” posts from Apple/iCloud competitors.

These guys don’t seem to realize one thing: no one gives a shit who did something first. It’s all about who did it right. iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc.

Maybe that will be Apple here, maybe not. But I can’t recall Apple doing a “me too” or “we were doing this first” type post after a competitor launches something. 

If you have to tell people you won, you lost.