Apple trying to store your video in the cloud
Apple's plans for cloud computing go beyond music. — The company's representatives have recently spoken with some of the major film studios about enabling iTunes users to store their content on the company's servers, two people familiar with the discussions told CNET.
Context & Ripple Effects
CNET reports that Apple representatives have approached major film studios about letting iTunes users store purchased video on Apple's servers — an extension of the company's cloud ambitions beyond music, though the studio discussions remain unconfirmed by either side.
The timing matters: this lands weeks before the iPad's retail debut, with Apple's broader cloud effort still taking shape internally, and amid a stretch where Apple is simultaneously fighting on other platform fronts — the confirmed HTC patent suit filed in Delaware and the public clash with Adobe over Flash. A cloud locker for video would make Apple's devices less dependent on local storage, which is exactly the constraint a tablet form factor imposes.
First-order effects
- Apple needs per-studio licensing agreements before any video locker ships — each major studio becomes a gatekeeper whose content-ownership terms determine what iTunes buyers can actually stream back from Apple's servers.
- iTunes customers' purchases could shift from files they hold to licenses hosted on Apple infrastructure, changing what 'owning' a movie on iTunes means.
Second-order effects
- Whatever terms Apple negotiates first with the studios become the reference deal for every other hardware maker seeking cloud-video rights, putting rivals in the position of accepting Apple's template or fighting for their own.
- If video moves server-side, device storage stops being the ceiling on how much content a customer accumulates — raising the strategic value of Apple's servers and weakening a selling point for competitors' higher-capacity players.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Hollywood's licensing cadence — not engineering readiness — becomes the pacing item for consumer cloud media, forcing an industry-wide renegotiation of ownership rights for digitally sold film and TV.
- Media consumption structurally migrates toward access-from-any-device models, with the companies that control both the storefront and the servers gaining the strongest lock on customer libraries.
The trend: Consumer media is migrating from locally stored files to server-hosted lockers, with studio licensing negotiations emerging as the critical path for Apple and every other platform holder.