iCloud Free Trial, $25 Per Year, and Ads?

[thermodynamic]

More a generalized comment than being Apple-centric: I long for the days that pay content didn't include ads, because you're paying for it already. Cable TV, DVDs, etc, are littered with ads. Profits keep skyrocketing (or, rather, most of these venues aren't suffering), so they're just being greedy with double-dipping.

 

[thermodynamic]

Can't see why apple doesn't lower the price for mobile me to $25 a year as well. You get more fly's with honey

In the end, just getting the flies matters. After all, Charlie Sheen said "I already got your money, dude!", which is pretty much business in a nutshell - even if it's tarted up to make the suc... customers feel all warm and fuzzy inside. (Sorry to be cynical... Apple, at least with customers, has a great service track record, but nothing is so black and white. Not even Apple is immune. And, maybe in the end, there is a greater good... time will tell.)

 

[DavidG328]

I'd rather store things locally, not have to worry about buffering and save $25 a year.

I'll echo that. I'd rather just carry my iPod and not worry about buffeting. Its not often vie gone through my 32 gigs and need more. Plus, not all of it was purchased through iTunes, so I'm screwed for now on that.

 

[supercooled]

I really thought iCloud had a lot of promise and coming from Apple, I expected a lot more but if at face value it is true, then there's no sense in going with iCloud more than say, a hosting service. Many of us run home servers that can stream music just fine. This is rather lacklustered news if I ever saw one.


iTunes purchases should have had this service available from day one or very soon after launch. Apple built that gargantuan facility to basically function as a media streaming hub? Disappointing indeed.

 

[Cougarcat]

iTunes purchases should have had this service available from day one or very soon after launch. Apple built that gargantuan facility to basically function as a media streaming hub? Disappointing indeed.

For the 15 billionth time, iCloud is not just the music service.

 

[Don Kosak]

I can't imagine ads being played between the songs you own already.

I could imagine an iCloud "genius radio station" playing music you do not own supported by location-aware commercials.

I can't imagine ads being shown while streaming video you bought outright.

I could imagine an iCloud TV station carrying same-week TV Episodes supported entirely by advertising. (people like Comcast already do this on their InfinityTV internet service.) There are generally fewer ads than on broadcast TV.

Anyway, if I'm interested in a TV show and given a choice: Pay $3 to watch, or Pay $0 - but sit through the commercials you would have seen on broadcast TV, I'm probably going to sit through the commercials.

The per episode prices for standard TV shows have been just too high. Especially if you compare that to buying the "box set DVD collection" at the end of the season.

 

[alphaod]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8G4 Safari/6533.18.5)

Damn what will I do with my 10 years' worth of MobileMe family packs?

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

There's no way that the labels would agree to let Apple host all of the music files that you have because there's no guarantee that you actually purchased those files or legitimately ripped them from a CD. This isn't surprising at all.

Everyone should be taking all of this with a grain of salt and waiting for Monday.

In other words, it's virtually worthless. You can already re-download any purchases you made for free from iTunes. So if you forgot to put Lady Gaga's new album on your MBP from your Mac Pro (as an example) before you went on vacation, you could just re-download it off iTunes to your authorized MBP and you're set and it won't cost you $25 a year. Music is so small and fast to transfer, having it on a cloud is not very useful unless your entire music collection is there, IMO. Movies might be more useful, but that assumes you have a large iTunes purchased movie collection (I converted most of my own because Apple's SD movies suck for quality and there still aren't that many HD titles available to buy).

In any case, I just got 20GB of Cloud storage from Amazon for 99 Cents AND the new Lady Gaga album in its entirety. That beats $25 a year even if the album turns out to not be to my taste. And I think you always get 5GB for free even if you don't buy anything ever. I still doubt I will use the cloud storage either way. Non-music cannot be batch-loaded or un-loaded and like I said, music is easily stored on almost any modern device. It might be useful for a small iPod or something, but then WiFi eats the battery time so bad, it'd still be very limiting.

 

[caspersoong]

Goodbye iCloud. If this is all Apple's got, I am sorely disappointed.

 

[jonnysods]

$0-25 is okay by me.

Hoping that this is a dropbox killer.

 

[AaronTheYoung]

bandwidth consumption?

What about streaming over your limited 3G connection? I understand that WiFi would be the choice to stream your music over, but what happens when your kids don't really care and they just start streaming over the limited connection and BAM, you suddenly are paying an extra $25 or $50 that month for data consumption.

I'm skeptical about ever using this. It'd be nice if they had safeguards like they do for their app downloads. 10 GB or more and you can't download. It'd be nice if they had a switch for streaming ONLY over wifi.

We'll see. I think Apple will choose to make money instead of protect the consumer. But, again, we'll see.

 

[Click4Dough]

The main benefit to could storage for me was to keep all my data in 3 locations. I have my hard drive, my SD backup and then a cloud version in case a fire were to happen. But i am concerned with data security. I have went paperless and keep all of my financial documents on my pc. I am not so sure i like all my financial documents in a "cloud" that have my SSN # on them.