Will we see the fruits of Apple’s Lala acquisition on Sept. 1?
It’s that time of year-the leaves turn color, sports bars start to fill up again, and Apple announced a media event. As always, there’s speculation about new iPods and what may come of the iPad, but I’m more interested in one thing: iTunes. Ever since Apple bought Lala early this year, I’ve been eagerly awaiting to see what Apple did with the technology.
What set Lala apart from the other services was that it had a library of music on its servers, and matched your music with theirs. If you owned a track, you and you could listen to that track whenever you wanted. If Lala didn’t have it on their servers, you could upload the track to them. This allowed you to put your entire music library in the cloud, and not worry about storage since Lala already owned a lot of music themselves.
There were two flaws to this service. One, you needed a WiFi device in order to stream your music away from your computer. Even though I have an iPhone, I use my iPod every day simply because it has much more storage and the volume’s a little louder on it. The second flaw was that there was no iPhone app, and since Lala relied on Flash, there was no way to stream the audio to your iPhone/iPod Touch, even if you wanted to. An app was in the works, but scrapped after Apple bought Lala.
Apple also once allowed users to stream music from their Macs, treating them like servers, but once Apple got wind of how users were using the service to share music outside its intended scope, Apple turned that feature off, leaving it only for a closed network. A Lala-based service could bring that service back without worry of sharing the music outside its intended recipients.
So that brings us to today. iTunes is up to version 9.2, and hasn’t had a major upgrade since 09/09/09. iTunes 8 had a one-year lifespan, so it’s possible that iTunes will get bumped to iTunes 10 (X?), and feature a streaming service. The new music streaming service Rdio got a lot of traction recently, but I haven’t signed up simply because I wanted to see if Apple would come up with something. It looks like we may see the fruits of that on Sept. 1.
Oh, and I also predict cameras in iPod Touches.
What are your thoughts on this? How would it affect both WiFi and home bandwidth? Could this be banned by workplaces? Talk about it in our forums.
Category: Technology
