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Apple to Stream Video As Well as Music and TV?
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I have to be honest, I'm really surprised so many self-described computer-savvy folks are so willing to give up total control of their media to "the cloud".
Eventually I do think it's inevitable that most content will be digitally distributed (it will still be a good number of years before that happens imho) but until then I plan on holding on to physical media until it's pried from my cold dead hands.
What if you can't get a connection where you are to retrieve something from the cloud? What if there's a service outage at the source? What if a studio or company decides to pull content you paid for already for whatever reason (remember the "1984" Kindle recall)?
I certainly don't trust the cloud, that's for sure.
Of course your mileage may vary.
Eventually I do think it's inevitable that most content will be digitally distributed (it will still be a good number of years before that happens imho) but until then I plan on holding on to physical media until it's pried from my cold dead hands.
What if you can't get a connection where you are to retrieve something from the cloud? What if there's a service outage at the source? What if a studio or company decides to pull content you paid for already for whatever reason (remember the "1984" Kindle recall)?
I certainly don't trust the cloud, that's for sure.
Of course your mileage may vary.
Can't you use one of the iPhone / iPod apps that already do that? (Simplify Media for example, im sure there are others)
Absolutely. I was wondering why Steve didn't demo this. Since any Mac with iTunes can see a shared library on the same LAN, wouldn't it make sense that the iPad should be able to do that too? If you are going to use the iPad around the house, it would save you a lot of dough to get the smallest storage version and just watch anything available on your Mac.
As far as streaming over the net, there are apps for the iPhone that do this already. Simplify Media is one example. Since the iPad supports iPhone apps, that seems to be a done deal. I suppose you could simply use it locally as well. But I still don't understand why Apple didn't demo built-in support for your own iTunes library. I'm with you Dagless.
I know the iPhone supports a VPN, I would assume the iPad would as well. Could this be used? (I know you have issues with different subnets. I think you can get around that with a bit of creativity.)
It is kinda worrying how much we're going to rely on the Internet. I'm already frustrated if my connection is down and I can't read my mail or surf the web.
Imagine if you won't be able to listen to your music, or watch a movie when your connection is down!
I'd rather it be built straight into the iPod, full integration as if the files were right on my iPod.
I assume you'll always be able to access whatever is stored locally. Obviously, you wouldn't have all your data in that case. If that happened to me, I'd just find something else to do with my time.
But what happens when your hard drive(s) crashes? How is all that data recreated? Sure, mass storage is fairly cheap. But if it's damaged, what do you do? I certainly don't want to spend the rest of my life worrying about my data and whether I'm going to lose everything. So for me, the cloud makes a lot of sense. Even if my connection is lost for a time, when it's restored I'll be back where I left off. Until then, I'd get by with whatever's on my device, or just go out for a walk.
There is a company, their name is Apple. They make this cool backup software called Time Machine.
I don't know if it is true or not, I have heard that you can talk Apple into letting you re-download everything you have purchased from them, but only once. If you have more than a few hundred movies and TV shows, that could take a bit of time and use up some of your bandwidth cap.
Edited to say, "NAS RAID 10."
And there's my point about the cloud. Why bother downloading all that data when it could simply remain in the cloud?
Of course, this assumes a fast and stable network for all. I think that was one of our constitutional guarantees, wasn't it?
LOL - exactly the problem with the "cloud" and digital downloads.
Even worse for cloud storage, since many people have upload
bandwidth that's a small fraction of their download bandwidth.