The Case for Moving iTunes to the Cloud

By MG Siegler

Here we are on the eve of another Apple (AAPL) event. There is never a shortage of hype surrounding these, but this one may have a bit more than normal because of the possibility that it could be Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ first public gig since returning to the company following a lengthy and very serious medical leave of absence.

But it’s entirely possible that Jobs won’t be leading this event. And it’s starting to look more possible that what’s thought to be the key product, iPods with cameras, may have to be delayed. And that tablet computer seems pretty unlikely. And The Beatles on iTunes is far from a lock. In other words, there are a lot of possible ways that Apple could disappoint with this event.

But Apple doesn’t like to disappoint, it likes to surprise. And that’s why I’m holding out hope for a big one: iTunes in the cloud.

Now, the likelihood of Apple announcing this on Wednesday seems fairly small. After all, even if Apple has to delay the launch of it iPods with cameras, it will still likely announce them at the event. And it likely has a new, more social iTunes 9, and its new “Cocktail” music format ready to be announced as well. All of that would seem to be enough for what will be a relatively small event in San Francisco — especially if Jobs does take the stage.

But, as myself and others have noted before, iTunes in the cloud is inevitable.

An Expansion Of Music

When iTunes was confined solely to music on your desktop, life was good. There was a lot of talk about how subscription-based streaming services would kill the pay-to-download iTunes model, but that never happened. Instead, iTunes continued to dominate the landscape.

But things are evolving. The new hotshot in the music space is Spotify, which despite not being available in the U.S. yet, has plenty of people going gaga. The interesting thing about it is that everyone praises its user experience and being second-to-none, including yes, iTunes. Spotify has raised a ton of money, and counts some of the major music labels as investors, and also just launched an iPhone app. As Apple is attempting to make its software more social, you had better believe they are watching the reaction to Spotify closely.

And iTunes itself is evolving. As we are likely to see on Wednesday, Apple and the music labels are pushing for these new “Cocktail” type album downloads that feature much more than just music. A key component is likely to be video, which obviously takes up a lot more space than music. That, alongside Apple’s move earlier this year to a fully iTunes Plus (DRM-free) store, has meant that the space needed to hold all of this music has been going up.

As most people have computers these days with large hard drives, they have been able to handle iTunes music on their machines without much trouble. But a push for more video — especially if it’s HD video — will mean more storage that is needed. And that’s before we get to the real keys to the iTunes in the cloud idea: Movies and television shows.

iTunes’ Video Problem

Apple has obviously been increasing its movie and television show library over the past few years. It now has a fairly robust offering, including many shows and movies in high definition (HD). But have you ever really looked at the size of those files? Anyone who has more than a few of them likely has, because you were probably forced to, as you were running out of room on your hard drive.

Let’s look at the most recent season of ABC’s show Lost. If you bought the HD Season Pass of the show on iTunes, that’s 28.2 GB of data on your hard drive. That’s one season. Of one show.

Say you also bought last season of The Office (a 30-minute show versus the hour-long Lost), that’s 19.43 GB. Those two shows alone — again, just one season of each — have nearly 50 GB of your hard drive tied up right there. Throw a few HD movies (usually 3 to 4 GB each), and maybe a few more shows and you’re going to need hundreds of gigabytes for all of these. And God forbid you want the other 4 seasons of Lost or The Office.

The way to combat this problem right now is to do what I did: Buy terabyte external hard drives. But let’s be honest, most average consumers are not going to do that. If and when they see that their entire hard drive has been eaten up by season 3 of My Name Is Earl, they’re going to be upset. It’s probably more likely that they’d simply delete the content. But should they really have to do that for content they paid for? Of course not.

Apple’s Options

That leaves Apple with two options:

1) Offer television show rentals. This is certainly something it could, and may do, but it would be a short-term fix.

2) Move iTunes fully to the cloud.

Actually, iTunes is really already in the cloud — kind of. If you delete a piece of content from your machine, Apple will allow you to download it again (at least once). This is more or less the idea of how iTunes in the cloud would work. Rather than storing all your media locally on your machine, it would be stored on iTunes’ servers in the cloud — which again, they’re already doing.

If you bought a television show, movie or even song, you’d be able to stream it from Apple’s servers. Or, if you wanted to take it on the go, on your iPod or iPhone, you could download it and store a physical copy locally. There would be no risk in deleting content locally when you were done with it, because Apple would have a copy for you to obtain again.

Concerns

Now, this idea is so obvious that it has to be coming, right? Well, there are obviously some concerns as well. First, security. The music labels and television and movie studios would want assurances from Apple that no one could “game the system” and get access to content for free. With iTunes in the cloud, Apple would likely have to partially rework the 5 computers-at-a-time system for iTunes that it uses right now (for DRM content), but something similar would probably be intact.

The second concern would be cost. Apple undoubtedly spends a lot of money now serving music and movies over iTunes, but it’s for the most part a one-time deal, where a user pays and then downloads the content. If you introduce streaming into the mix, costs will go up. But perhaps that is part of the reason behind Apple’s new massive 500,000 square foot datacenter in North Carolina — which will be one of the largest in the world.

Untenable

The fact of the matter is that any way you slice it, iTunes current model is untenable. Even if you opt to get standard definition video content from the service, we’re talking ten to a dozen gigabytes of storage needed for just one season of a television show. Movies are still over a gigabyte a piece. If you buy as much content as Apple and the studios would like you to, you’re going to fairly quickly get into the hundreds of gigabytes and then terabytes range. I should know, I’m already there.

Meanwhile, there’s a movement underway to more portable machines that feature smaller amounts of storage. Obviously, there are netbooks, but you can also be sure that Apple’s tablet device, when it comes out, will not have a terabyte of storage. And Apple itself has been starting to push faster, but smaller capacity, SSD drivers in its laptop lines.

The larger point is that while it’s great to own your own content, most customers likely do not want terabytes of data cluttering up their machines. It becomes a huge management burden. And if you get a new machine, transfers are a hassle.

There are some other short-term solutions, like the aforementioned TV show rentals, but long term, the only viable model would seem to be Apple holding all of this content for us on its servers. Streaming a huge collection of movies works beautifully right now for Netflix via its Watch Instantly service. Apple would need a download component to supplement its portable devices, but it likely can and will be done.

Months ago, there were rumors of such a service called “iTunes Replay” for iTunes 8, but nothing ever came of them. But since then, Apple has launched services like HD movie downloads — the need for such a service is only getting greater. And it will continue to.

Apple chose to use a Rolling Stones’ lyric as the tagline for this event, “It’s only rock and roll, but we like it.” Here’s to hoping that they work in another Stones’ lyric as well, “On my cloud, baby.”

[photos: flickr/Kables and flickr/preater]

Original post

Comments

[waf76:]

I agree with you completely. I have a lot of shows and movies on my computer but had to buy an external 500G to accomodate what I have. I have like 200 G of video content on itunes. I like to take different shows and movies with me on my iphone. I also subscribe to netflix so if past seasons of my favorite show are available to view on my xbox such as the two you've mentioned, i dont bother with it on itunes. If Apple can make Apple TV prominent, I would like to see a catalog of certain shows and movies like Netflix available through streaming content for a subscription fee of say $9.99 a month.

Sep 08 01:14 PM

[jack dee:]

This is easy to do with MS MediaCenter, you can see everything through MC , and take them with you too. But then the apple kids will say, MSFT never leads and only follows, meanwhile apple lags MSFT by years in this area.

Try if free, with Win7. You can even build out a full box with a thousand gigs and DVR , remote the lot for 250- 400 depending on how flash you want it to look.
One box, linking online offline content of all types, streaming netflix and providing Full DVR features. and it comes free with windows.
Oh and you can always surf, utube and Hulu too.
And did I say you can take it with you?

On Sep 08 01:14 PM waf76 wrote:

> I agree with you completely. I have a lot of shows and movies on
> my computer but had to buy an external 500G to accomodate what I
> have. I have like 200 G of video content on itunes. I like to take
> different shows and movies with me on my iphone. I also subscribe
> to netflix so if past seasons of my favorite show are available to
> view on my xbox such as the two you've mentioned, i dont bother with
> it on itunes. If Apple can make Apple TV prominent, I would like
> to see a catalog of certain shows and movies like Netflix available
> through streaming content for a subscription fee of say $9.99 a month.

Sep 08 01:31 PM

[whidbey:]

It is the way things are going and the move will hopefully stimulate a mass move to the cloud.

Sep 08 04:55 PM

[Xela99:]

External harddrives have gone down in price.walmart has external hard drives that sell for 130 dollars and hold 1.5 terrabites of space.however as a frequent traveler i find lugging a external harddrive around a pain in the ass and even droped in last week at the Dublin airport,good thing they make most of them out of hard metal and not plastic..Itunes in the clouds sounds solid.so long as there isnt a maintenance fee associated with them keeping your files off of your harddrive.

Sep 09 08:27 AM

[ebworthen:]

Computers are the pandora's box of humanity.

Remember the 286, 386, 486? Modern processors are 666.

Sep 09 08:54 AM

[southbeach:]

or everyone could buy expensive (though admittedly very nice looking) Apple time capsules...

Sep 09 10:03 AM

[Moon Kil Woong:]

External HD are the solution. You cab back up Terabytes now. In a few years at this rate it will be tens of terabytes. Technology is the only thing that improves your standard of living relative to inflation.

And there is nothing better than owning and having content yourself. If you don't they'll always be looking on how to deny you the content you already saw and how to monetize it yet again while sucking you dry.

Sep 09 10:10 AM

[rite aidsux:]

Apples 5 computers- at- a -time sucks! I was so happy to get rid of AOL (my original Apple i-tunes account) that when I switched to Comcast, do you really think that I had a clue what my password was with AOL 15 years ago, let alone when I bought music from the i-tunes store? Guess what...Apple offered no help in transfering any music to my new laptop I had to repurchase everything and this came from the Genius Bar at Natick, MA. Yeah, they are real Geniuses! Apple has no means of over riding their own system to accomodate the customer. And the rediculous constant updates to the software makes the unit you bought 6 months ago obsolete! I had to buy the wall charger and refuse all software updates to keep access to my music. Apple is a fraud and out to steal your money. I don't care what they come out with, they suck! Why won't Microsoft come out with a decent MP3 player that is compatible with Vista?

Sep 09 10:11 AM

[ebworthen:]

The eventual goal is to make you pay everytime you want to listen to a song.

You don't own anything you buy on iTunes, you are only leasing it, at their pleasure (leisure).

I still have albums with cover art and lyrics from 30 years ago. The millions upon millions of iPod users will have NOTHING in only five years; they will be repurchasing every song of their youth.

Brilliant, no?

Of course, I remember paying for cable T.V. because it had no commercials.

Baaahhhh!


On Sep 09 10:11 AM rite aidsux wrote:

> Apples 5 computers- at- a -time sucks! I was so happy to get rid
> of AOL (my original Apple i-tunes account) that when I switched to
> Comcast, do you really think that I had a clue what my password was
> with AOL 15 years ago, let alone when I bought music from the i-tunes
> store? Guess what...Apple offered no help in transfering any music
> to my new laptop I had to repurchase everything and this came from
> the Genius Bar at Natick, MA. Yeah, they are real Geniuses! Apple
> has no means of over riding their own system to accomodate the customer.
> And the rediculous constant updates to the software makes the unit
> you bought 6 months ago obsolete! I had to buy the wall charger and
> refuse all software updates to keep access to my music. Apple is
> a fraud and out to steal your money. I don't care what they come
> out with, they suck! Why won't Microsoft come out with a decent MP3
> player that is compatible with Vista?

Sep 09 12:55 PM

[:HAn.:]

How do you figure you don't own the songs you downloaded?? You are implying that one day Apple will take them all away and make you pay for them again? Are you mad?


On Sep 09 12:55 PM ebworthen wrote:

> The eventual goal is to make you pay everytime you want to listen
> to a song.
>
> You don't own anything you buy on iTunes, you are only leasing it,
> at their pleasure (leisure).
>
> I still have albums with cover art and lyrics from 30 years ago.
> The millions upon millions of iPod users will have NOTHING in only
> five years; they will be repurchasing every song of their youth.
>
>
> Brilliant, no?
>
> Of course, I remember paying for cable T.V. because it had no commercials.
>
>
> Baaahhhh!

Sep 09 05:54 PM

[:HAn.:]

Well, I have to say, its your own damn fault for not investigating your options. Apple's DRM (which has since gone the way of the dodo, FYI), is extremely easy to circumvent. There are applications like DRM Dumpster specifically designed to help people like you by stripping away the DRM. But instead, you just decided to ignorantly help the company you hate become more rich. Apparently you aren't as bright as your comment tries to make you appear.

On Sep 09 10:11 AM rite aidsux wrote:

> Apples 5 computers- at- a -time sucks! I was so happy to get rid
> of AOL (my original Apple i-tunes account) that when I switched to
> Comcast, do you really think that I had a clue what my password was
> with AOL 15 years ago, let alone when I bought music from the i-tunes
> store? Guess what...Apple offered no help in transfering any music
> to my new laptop I had to repurchase everything and this came from
> the Genius Bar at Natick, MA. Yeah, they are real Geniuses! Apple
> has no means of over riding their own system to accomodate the customer.
> And the rediculous constant updates to the software makes the unit
> you bought 6 months ago obsolete! I had to buy the wall charger
> and refuse all software updates to keep access to my music. Apple
> is a fraud and out to steal your money. I don't care what they come
> out with, they suck! Why won't Microsoft come out with a decent
> MP3 player that is compatible with Vista?

Sep 09 11:50 PM

[meridian575:]

Everyone is talking about the cloud. But what is the tech that drives that model? Yahoo Finance has an informative article that talks about the hardware behind the cloud, and the stocks associated with that sector:
finance.yahoo.com/news...

Sep 17 02:29 PM