Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Amazon Cloud Drive and Amazon Cloud Player - Your 5GB free cloud storage and digital music locker (and web based player)

The Road to Know Where - Amazon Releases Cloud Drive – 5GB Free!

Amazon Cloud Drive is your hard drive in the cloud. Store your music, videos, photos, and documents on Amazon’s secure servers. All you need is a web browser to upload, download, and access your files from any computer.

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Amazon Cloud Drive - Help

What is Amazon Cloud Drive?

Amazon Cloud Drive is your hard-drive in the cloud. Securely store your music, videos, photos, and documents online and access them from anywhere.

All you need is a web browser to upload, download and access your files from any computer. Back up your files to ensure that your music, photos and personal documents are available to you wherever you go.

The Amazon Cloud drive offers 5 GB of free online storage that you can access from any computer. If you need more storage space, paid plans are available for storage up to 1,000 GB.

Automatically store your Amazon MP3 Purchases

When you purchase digital downloads from the Amazon MP3 Store, you can choose to automatically save your purchases to your Cloud Drive. All your purchases will be backed up and available to download anywhere, anytime.

Safe and secure storage

Amazon Cloud Drive provides customers with reliable, secure server storage. Each file is stored within Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3); the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.

Access to your Cloud Drive is controlled through your Amazon.com user ID and password. All communications are encrypted using HTTPS, so that your data can pass securely over the Internet.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to make a purchase to use Cloud Drive?

No, if you have an Amazon account, you have access to 5 GB of free online storage on Amazon Cloud Drive. If you purchase an album from the Amazon MP3 Store, you may be eligible for a free upgrade to 20 GB of Cloud Drive space for one year (this promotion is open to U.S. customers only). New Amazon MP3 purchases delivered to Cloud Drive do not count against a customer's storage space. If you need more storage space, paid plans are available for storage up to 1,000 GB.

What kinds of files can I store on Cloud Drive?

Amazon Cloud Drive allows customers to upload their digital files: music, photos, videos, documents, and more can be stored securely and available via web browser on any computer. New Amazon MP3 purchases delivered to Cloud Drive do not count against a customer's storage space.

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Amazon Cloud Player - Help

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Amazon Cloud Player for Web is a browser-based digital music player that lets you access music stored in your Cloud Drive for playback or download. Amazon Cloud Player requires an Internet connection and supports most browsers found on Mac or PC computers. You can launch the Amazon Cloud Player from the Amazon MP3 store or by going directly to www.amazon.com/cloudplayer. For a current list of supported browsers go to Amazon Cloud Player System Requirements. Additional platforms supported by Cloud Player are listed below.

Add your music collection to Cloud Drive

Amazon Cloud Player also supports the upload of music and playlists from your computer to Amazon Cloud Drive, making them accessible for playback and download. All new accounts are given free storage to begin uploading their content and greater storage tiers are available at an annual rate. See the Amazon Cloud Drive settings page for more information on special offers and pricing for larger storage solutions. All Amazon MP3 purchases saved directly to your Cloud Drive are stored for free and dont count against your storage limits.

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Wow. This could be big… Given how Amazon has proven themselves in delivering services across products (i.e. Kindle books) think just how ground shaking this could be. This is what Microsoft’s SkyDrive could have been.

Will be keeping my eyes open for more details and utilities (like means to map a drive in Windows, play music in other players, SDK/API, etc, etc)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

These services are nice, but unless they offer functionality similar to DropBox or SugarSync which has Windows Explorer extensions or allows me to sync it with a local drive. I am not really going to use the product either Amazon's Cloud Drive or Microsoft's Skydrive. I don't want to fire up a browser just to upload some files. I want the convenience of dropping files to a folder in Window Explorer.

Mark Hicks

Greg said...

Yeah, I heard you Mark...

But at this point I'm wondering if a good future bet isn't Amazon. I like how they've thought of monetizing this, how they've intergrated it (so far) and their history with cross platform. Like you, I'm not jumping on today, but I sure am going to be watching it closly.

I continue to be impressed with Amazon...

Hal (GT) said...

I've never tried dropbox but I've seen it mentioned a few times in relation to this Amazon service which to me could be real gold. Amazon is very much turned into integration of all their services so I am certain that this particular service will improve over time.

I'm definitely going to try it out since I spend a lot of money and time on Amazon's site anyway. Plus it'll be nice to have access to music over my phone.

Anonymous said...

I can see this service expanding, though currently, as I understand it, it only support music at this time. It provides 5 GB initially, then another 20 (I think) when you buy a CD (in electronic form, MP3).

This is nice, but since I have a Synology NAS box (DS209) it provides music streaming capabilities and I have a lot more storage. There is even an iPhone app which will communicate with the NAS. Granted, it will not have the up time as the Amazon services, but perhaps good enough for my needs.

Ultimately, I think this cloud drive will need to expand to other types of content just as Microsoft's Sky Drive allows.

Mark Hicks

Greg said...

@lordhog:
"What kinds of files can I store on Cloud Drive?

Amazon Cloud Drive allows customers to upload their digital files: music, photos, videos, documents, and more can be stored securely and available via web browser on any computer...."

So you can store more than music...