Apple Said To Prepare ITunes Changes To Improve Sharing | Hacker News Reader

Apple Said To Prepare ITunes Changes To Improve Sharing

bloomberg.com

10 pointsrmah7 comments

I thought that Google's I/O demonstration of the Nexus Q was quite interesting. You just tap your phone on the Nexus Q and then you can use your phone to direct/stream any of your media for playback on that Nexus Q. For example anyone at a party could tap their phone on the Q and then select their own music to add to the playlist. Or if you're visiting a friend and want to watch a movie or TV show together, just tap the Q with your phone and you can then watch it on their TV without mucking with the DRM. It just works. I think it would be very interesting to get this sort of thing into hotels. Tap your phone and your Netflix queue shows up without all the login pain. Or send your own photos/videos from Picasa/YouTube. It looks very liberating and has the potential to make all the DRM pain go away.

Most of the demonstrated Nexus Q functionality has already existed on the Apple side with AirPlay and Apple TV. It's a different take, and the Q certainly has some interesting features, but it's not new, and the price is an issue.

Well, that's pretty cool--I'm not much of an Apple user lately (iTunes not available for any of my devices/OSs) but I don't think iPhones have NFC and that's the part that I'm pretty impressed about. I guess I view streaming as a solved problem, so that's not really what I'm impressed about.

What excites me more is I think Nexus Q is showing us how a future can work where we're surrounded by networked displays and screens that we may or may not own, but we can still get full use of just by being physically in front of them. That's what I think is exciting. I can see the functionality of the Nexus Q built into TVs in the future--just connect the TV to the internet and touch your phone to it and boom, everything's set up without fussing with passwords and accounts. Visit your parents, touch your phone to the TV and boom it's as if it's your own TV.

I'm not really sure why they are even using NFC for the setup. All the streaming is done over wifi anyway. I guess NFC could be used to reconfigure the wifi as needed which could be useful in some cases where your streaming target is on a different network.

No, it doesn't stream from the phone to the Nexus Q. It tells the Nexus Q where to get it from the cloud. The NFC is a handshake based on physical proximity to establish credentials for the Q to access the your cloud ephemera. (wifi streaming may also be available as a feature, not sure)

Didn't they just remove Ping?

At WWDC they showed off more Facebook and Twitter integration with the new Share button that's being implemented throughout the OS. My guess is that iTunes will also get some form of the Share button, allowing you to post about songs you like to Facebook or Twitter.

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