It's interesting that Japan get a clock (no Australia, which is a bigger market). Just last week Japan got the ability to purchase & rent movies, and that this announcement comes so soon after is probably not a coincidence. So something with the store, and something to do with movies.
Making this big a deal of an announcement, so close to the holiday season, makes me think that it's also something that is intended to give people a reason to buy Apple hardware.
Side note: Back when AppleTV2 was unveiled, Jobs said that you would be able to rent movies "day and date" with DVD releases. That hasn't been true to this point - embarrassingly Iron Man 2 which he demonstrated on stage wasn't available for rental until the DVD had been out for some time.
So I'm going to go with better movie rentals - earlier availability (perhaps much earlier, for a premium), possibly bundled movies, possibly the removal of the stupid contractual stuff where some movies become unrentable due to TV deals and hampers the library.
I'm sure Apple would love to give lots of families a reason to buy themselves an Apple TV's for Christmas this year, particularly with Boxee/Google now pushing into that market.
Just last week, I couldn't gift an iPhone game to a friend because he wouldn't have been able to get it from his "local" store.
http://erictric.com/2010/11/15/itunes-live-stream-reference-...
The UK clock has me in agreement with you. Making the Apple TV a value proposition in the UK.
It was a music player. Now it's a music, video, book, and app store and media center, as well as a connection hub for all of your accessory devices. I have a feeling that whatever they announce tomorrow will only be a proliferation of this trend.
"iTunes" has got a ton of brand awareness, but we've seen them appropriately drop "Computer" from their company name and "Phone" from iOS. Still, probably a long shot.
Imagine these icons running vertically down the side of the new "iWhatever" client similar to the way they made the "Maximize/Minimize/Close" buttons vertical in the latest rev.
This would actually be very similar to what Adobe did after it acquired Macromedia and faced the similar problem of having a jumble of apps that worked together, but lacked consistent branding and structure. They assigned everything a color and a "Periodic Table" naming convention which cohesively tied their products together.
http://www.thehighcontrast.com/family-tree/
Another similarity is that most designers hated that change, just as they did the new iTunes icon!
I wouldn't be surprised by anything.
For all the talk of bloat, the changes and additions over the last few years to the main functionality have been quite restrained and user-focused: sorting by album by artist, adding a “sort by” metadata field, improving the organization of playlists, “smart” playlists, and playlist folders, views organized by album art rather than text, improvements to the column browser, &c. Even what I would call “bloaty” features like the “genius playlist” and “ping” can be easily turned off.
I don't know enough about the history of music players to say whether iTunes created those innovations (though I'd be surprised, except for the album art one), I can say for sure most any other media player these days will do those. And while the bloat can be turned off, I still found it to be have ridiculous start up time on Windows. It would take 10+ seconds just to open. I've said this on HNs before, but switching from iTunes to foobar2000 was by far the best software decision I've made, perhaps just barely behind switching from IE to Firefox. For the longest time I just took it for granted that iTunes was the best music player, but when I looked at the alternatives (pre-update Amarok, foobar2000, etc), I really found iTunes was a lot worse than I thought it was. The only feature I've come to miss are smart playlists, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a foobar plugin for them.
What I like about iTunes is that, in one window, it shows me all of my music in a way that is clean, consistent, and very easy to navigate. At least for my own usage patterns, the “one big window with an effective search box” display is just what I want. If it takes 10 seconds to start (as it does on my laptop), that’s frankly not a problem, as I just leave it open all the time; it doesn’t take any CPU to speak of when it’s not actively playing music.
Why can't I have my view settings sticky across all the various views? Why do you INSIST on showing me the utterly useless genres by default? Why, in list mode, when reverse sorting an album by year (to, say, play your Cows collection from most recent to oldest) it reverses the track ordering? That last one, by the way, is marked "Works as Expected". Works as expected.
It gets especially bad once you add multiple iDevices and use them for the same purpose over different time spans.
Example: If I get home and want to continue listening to the current podcast on the iPad, I have to first sync my iPhone and then the iPad.
And if, on the next day, I want to finish the podcast on the iPhone, I have to remember to sync both devices again (iPad first) or I'll have to use the awful time slider on the iPhone to find the correct play position again.
Same goes for Audiobooks where it's even worse due to their length and sometimes more monotonous content (makes it harder to find the correct play position, or might spoil the content if you are really unlucky and skip ahead too far).
And don't get me started about the fact that at least my iTunes install insists on either installing all new iPhone-apps on my iPad or deleting all apps I installed directly from the App Store on the device, depending on how the checkbox is set.
This ugly mess has to end.
It worked "ok" (wireless podcast sync would always have been nice) while we had only one device. It became totally broken once we had multiple devices.
Yeah - what a luxury issue to have, but it's still totally non-apple and doesn't at all match their usually very slick user experience.
awful? I think it's fairly clever, myself.
... you do know that when you touch to 'grab' the nubbin, you can slide your finger down the face of the device a bit, and then when you slide left or right it scrubs more slowly, based on how far down the device you slid?
Which makes me wonder if someone "stumbled" upon that, or there is a secret iPhone user's manual that only special people receive.
In hindsight, I think that a more "audio scrobber" motion, akin to the way the iPod wheel works, would have been a ton more intuitive.
Or are there issues with those services, too?
But I want my internet connected mobile always-on device to be capable of a) checking for new podcast episodes over the air and b) wirelessly synchronizing the play position of various files across devices. Both operations are /trivial/.
I'm even willing to pay a small subscription fee for this.
I'm a really heavy podcast and audiobook listener. For me there is value in being able to come home, turning on my ipad and continuing to listen to my podcast where I left off on the iphone.
Or arriving at home and having the latest video podcasts already downloaded to the iPad without having to manually connect it to the PC (but after the iPhone or I'll lose the play position).
Or being able to listen to the newest episode of a podcast even though it came out after I left home.
That last one, I can already do in theory. It involves starting the itunes app on the iPhone and manually searching for the podcast, checking whether the latest episode has arrived.
Of course this is limited to podcasts actually on iTunes (no manual RSS download) and it sometimes seems to download the episode independently of the existing itunes subscription at which point I have two identical episodes the next time I connect the iPhone. No syncing of play position in that case.
What pains me the most is that I certainly have the ability to fix this on my own by writing my own podcast syncing code, but on a non-jailbroken device I don't get write-access to the itunes library and even if I could get it, it probably wouldn't sync back to the PC.
To use the common open source "I scratched an itch" metaphor: It's itching like mad, I have the ability to scratch and the needed tools, but no permission to actually do it and the itch scratching licensing board doesn't recognize my itch as something worthy of their scratching.
This is infuriating.
That certainly would never be forgotten.
That you'll never forget."
Am I the only one that laughed out loud when the second line faded in? I have given Steve Jobs more money than I care to admit, but the hyperbole is bordering on self-parody.
Most US radio stations (or at least all CBS stations) now stream live through iTunes.
User generated playlist stations will be supported, Apple inserts the ads. Users earn a cut of revenue for promoting such stations and encouraging people to buy more music.
One click purchase of anything you're listening to live.
Apple solves the demand generation problem and saves the music industry.
I'm not trying to make a not-so-subtle dig on Apple by saying this, but I don't own an i(Phone/Pod/Pad) or a Mac computer, so I don't use iTunes, which is horrific on Windows. I make most of my digital purchases on Amazon, who has a very effective web store of digital downloads at competitive prices. If iTunes were a web store, I'd be much more inclined to buy stuff from them.
I'll enjoy the fantasy for today at least.
My guess is that they wanted to release streaming in September, but the labels weren't completely on board at that point. They needed something to show in the new iTunes, so they released Ping.
I'm still flabbergasted that this is "front page news."
That would explain the Euro-friendly timing of the announcement (7 am California, 4 pm Paris).
And it's not an 'event'. I bet it's about streaming, and the PR effort will be based in New York (convenient for the big labels?), rather than in California.
NYC has big media companies and their CEOs, news media and their taping studios, and Wall Street.
North Carolina has a big building full of Apple's servers. (If it's even up and running yet.) You don't set the time for a press campaign based on a big building full of hardware.
From the point of view of an iTunes user, the NC data center is irrelevant. It's a hidden implementation detail. The iTunes store could be running on a G4 Mac Cube under Steve Jobs' desk, for all it matters.
At the office where the papers grow she takes a break
Drinks another coffee and she finds it hard to stay awake
It's just another day
It's just another day
It's just another dayApple already does DRM'd video streaming, and that's a much more difficult problem.
The only thing to stop streaming getting into iTunes is boss Jobs himself.
seriously, though, streaming is probably most likely, but i'm going to go with subscription service.