it also dreams of being a place where you can store your music, photos
and videos and access them any time, from any computer.
The online retailer launched two new offerings late Monday: Amazon
Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player.
The first lets you upload and store files like music, videos and
photos on Amazon's servers, which you can get to from a web browser on
a Mac or PC.
The second lets you play songs you've uploaded on your computer or on
a smartphone that runs Google's Android operating software.
The "cloud" in the services' names refers to the practice of storing
content online and streaming it to a computer over the internet.
Amazon's move is beating Google Inc. and Apple Inc., which are
believed to be working on similar services that would allow consumers
to access their content when away from their home computer.
While Amazon will charge for the Cloud Drive service, it's offering
anyone with an Amazon account 5 gigabytes of free storage.
That's less space than you'd get on the smallest iPod Touch, but it's
a move that's likely to woo plenty of users who might later decide to
pay for more storage space.
The Seattle-based company, which already runs an online storage
service for companies called Amazon S3, decided to roll out a consumer
cloud service to make it easier for customers to access digital
content no matter where they are, Amazon music director Craig Pape
said.
The offerings could also benefit Amazon's bottom line: The company
realised customers were hesitant to purchase MP3s at work because they
didn't want them tied to their office computer, Pape said, so Cloud
Drive and Cloud Player may drive more impulse music shopping.
"At the end of the day we're trying to delight customers, but we're
trying to sell more music, too," he said.
The company also wants to sell cloud storage.
If your tunes and videos take up more space than the 5 GB Amazon is
giving out, you can pay an annual storage fee to use Cloud Drive: The
use of 20 GB of storage, for example, will cost $US20 (and this
includes the 5 free GB).
For an undisclosed period of time, however, Amazon is offering 20 GB
of free storage to those who buy a digital album from its Amazon MP3
store.
