Rumor: Streaming iTunes To Be Released At WWDC

Put this firmly in the rumor file for right now, but Macsimum News is reporting that a live streaming version of iTunes will debut at this year’s WWDC, building upon Apple’s December purchase of online streaming service Lala.

According to Macsimum News, the new version of iTunes would allow shoppers to build digital media collections without having to store them locally. A service called iTunes Replay would allow users to stream their music, TV shows and movies purchased on iTunes so you wouldn’t ever need to download them if you didn’t want to.

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It makes sense: Apple bought that North Carolina server farm for something, after all. Hopefully, though, any new streaming iTunes would also function as a media dropbox for local files, which can be uploaded to Apple’s servers for instant streaming on any computer. Only WWDC will tell.

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John Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

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Posted in iTunes, News, Rumors |

Asier
And when we will be able to access our media via streaming from our iphone/ipad/other itunes in an elegant way? DLNA anyone? I’d love to see that from apple cause i can’t store (and i don’t want to replicate) all my music in my ipad (which i will use only at home)
http://ihbs.co.uk ben
the only problem with this is i couldnt listen to music while i sit and have my lunch in a small cafe inside a supermarket, because theres no data signal
Ken
My guess is that if this is released, it will be part of a MobileMe premium service, which will have an annual charge. The current feature set of MobileMe will then become free, as a number of rumors have already suggested.
charli
actually Ken, as servers cost space it is unlikely that ‘the current feature set’ will be free because it includes a huge chunk of space for websites, drop box style public folder etc.
now what might be free is the sync, find my thing etc. and likely email (with a server space limit) since those things are tied together. which would also provide you with a username for ichat/aim and all Apple ID functions. Then the rest would be part of the premium
as for charging for this replay service. no way. that would be double dipping. You already bought the song after all.
And itunes is likely to restrict this to music and only bought on itunes (perhaps audiobooks as well) due to file sizes and the movie studios and tv networks being loathe to sign off on such things even when they got their money already. Especially if it was LaLa style and wasn’t as much money since you don’t have a physical copy. streams can be jacked after all. So for even less you can have a pretty copy to torrent. Record labels will love the purchased only idea as well because of the whole torrent etc nonsense.
blindspot
I would not be surprised if it offered an option similar to the new Rhapsody App were you pay a monthly fee, stream whatever you like, and can download tracks for play in an “offline” mode in the app.
BoxMac
This is *completely* stupid.
What would you rather access: a data intensive stream from a network that is competing with millions of other people or a data intensive stream from local hardware that ony *you* use ?
Chris
maybe this could be part of MobileMe?? and maybe it would let me stream everything from my iTunes collection regardless of where I bought the tunes from? wishful thinking and daydreaming perhaps, I know.