Amazon extends cloud with new player and storage

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Amazon is a name that was once all about the online book trade. It is now a name that is synonymous with Cloud. Amazon EC2 and S3, Amazon’s best known cloud services though have been mostly targeted at enterprise developers, but that is now changing with the new Cloud Player and storage service that Amazon is debuting today.

In my view this creates the first real competitor to iTunes on the music side and will also compete against the myriad of backup services (many of which leverage S3) with the Cloud Drive service.

“The
launch of Cloud Drive, Cloud Player for Web and Cloud Player for Android
eliminates the need for constant software updates as well as the use of
thumb drives and cables to move and manage music,” said Bill Carr, vice president of Movies and Music at Amazon in a statement. “Our customers have told us they don’t want to download music to their
work computers or phones because they find it hard to move music around
to different devices.”

While Apple has a real lock with iTunes and its direct connect to iOS, Google doesn’t have such a lock. These new Amazon services could well displace Google and its nascent music ambitions before they’re even born. Amazon’s new cloud services are also specifically targeting PC and Android users.