It's just a nonentity to me. My iTunes is in the cloud at this point. I back up my iPhone and iPad to iTunes. And sometimes I grab a movie or TV show from my iTunes library for my AppleTV.
But, as a piece of software, it's not really something I use on a regular basis. The streaming service might be interesting, but I don't think the streaming services are going to happen until next year...?
Obviously others place more importance on it.
No I'm not talking about the rumored streaming services. I'm talking about streaming your already purchased content right from iTunes. I'm hoping the app itself should act like Netflix.
But first of all, your purchased content will
always appear on your library screen as if it was downloaded, even though you might not have. This is a huge plus for me right off the bat because you don't have to go back and forth between your library and the store just to see what you've purchased. Have you tried redownloading your purchased content from the iTunes store? It's highly inconvenient. Just see how many clicks/taps and how much loading it takes to do it. The way iTunes 11 is set up, with iCloud built in, you see everything right in front of you without having to go into the store. I personally love this new feature.
And my big hope (and i'm not 100% sure about this), is that you might be able stream the content right there from your library screen. So let's say you purchase a movie, but choose not to download it. With iTunes 11, it will always show on your library screen, because you've purchased it. And hopefully just by clicking "play", you can immediately stream it. Anyway, the other huge factor here is a huge savings in disk space for people like me who buy tons of HD movies and TV shows, as well as music. I have an external 2TB drive that is already 100% full and I had to stop downloading the latest episodes of The Walking Dead because I ran out. Now about 95% of movies and all TV shows are on iCloud so you no longer have to keep these stored locally on your drives. It means I can finally free up tons of disk space now and just stream my purchased content. It's just an incredibly more streamlined way of driving the iTunes store and iCloud efficiently to the user.