Amazon Cloud Player goes live, streams music on your computer and Android | Hacker News Reader

Amazon Cloud Player goes live, streams music on your computer and Android

engadget.com

30 pointsprofitbaron23 comments

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..

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 ...

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.

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.

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).

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.

I think it's a combination of not wanting to deal with approval and Apple (their Kindle app theoretically could be dropped for not using Apple's in-app-purchase system [which is pretty much impossible for an app with 5000+ IAPs!]), the rumored color Kindle running Android (which would likely use the Amazon Android Marketplace), and their various efforts in the general Android ecosystem including the Marketplace.

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.

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.

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....

Well, if you are a large player like Dropbox you'll get really good S3 rates because you fall into the higher tiers. If you are in the 5+ PB tier you are only paying $13.2 for 20 GB/year, whereas Amazon is charging $20. If you have enough scale you can probably make the numbers pen out.

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.

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.

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.

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).

I have a grandfathered in unlimited data plan, but even if I had a 2 gig plan, I don't actually use nearly that much very often. Most of my data usage is on wifi (when I'm at home, at work, or usually when out at lunch it's on wifi; when I'm on my commute it uses 3G).

I don't know whether Amazon's music player streams the music or whether it syncs and caches the music, but if the latter, most of the transfer would probably be on wifi as well.

There's an option to download music only when on wifi, and you can explicitly tell it to cache specified tracks on the device. You can also tell it to automatically sync new purchases.

I pay $25 a month for unlimited data and text on Virgin Mobile. Granted, nothing "unlimited" is really unlimited, but I stream music on my Android phone on this plan all the time and have not hit any soft or hard cap.

See, I pay $20 a month for two gigs (family plan for texts, so I don't think I can really compare that).

Also, Virgin Mobile in what country? I'm kind of curious if that plan's still available; seems most providers are scaling back.

The $25 plan is US. I just picked up the Optimus V and love it.

Here's the link to the plan: http://www.virginmobileusa.com/cell-phone-plans/beyond-talk-...

Except for everyone on Verizon, TMobile or Sprint whose unlimited plans are cheaper than AT&T's slow, capped, and not unlimited plans.

I know it's not for long, but you can't blame me for being happy while I do.

For U.S. Customers Only :(

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

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