A leaked presentation slide exclusive to PreCentral suggests that Hewlett-Packard is developing a cloud locker for music and movies for its webOS-drive TouchPad tablet. What’s best, HP doesn’t seem to be terribly interested in co-operating with record labels on the initiative:
This is actually good news for Apple…
MobileMe users can already store and stream music tracks to their iOS devices using the free iDisk app even though Apple isn’t advertising this feature. Third parties also offer similar cloud storage capabilities, including Dropbox and Mozy. The more big names in tech release cloud lockers without asking for the music industry’s permission, the less maneuvering space for the labels.
Of course, Apple is the biggest player in music and they will be scrutinized more than any other company, but the case is building for cloud lockers and it seems to me there’s nothing music executives can do about it. After all, it’s our own personal music collection and we should be able to store it wherever we like without being penalized by the greedy labels.
- Add Mozy to your list of cloud lockers for iOS (9to5mac.com)
- New MobileMe includes music locker, costs $20 per year? (9to5mac.com)
- Apple patents its cloud-based ‘locker’ called ‘Safe Deposit Box’ (9to5mac.com)
- Revamped MobileMe launches in April, current version phased out in a year? (9to5mac.com)
- Apple building super datacenters all over the world to support a new video gadget, says analyst (9to5mac.com)
