9
Content- and Entertainment-Centric Software
9.1 iClouds and MyClouds
In this chapter we review how content and entertainment software has changed over the past five to seven years and set this in the context of contemporary events (announcements that have occurred literally as this chapter is being written (June 2011)).
These include the announcement by Apple of iCloud,1 a set of free cloud services intended to encourage people to store data and access applications on demand remotely (in the cloud) for access from any device but including the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac and PC. The assumption is that you might own all of these and if anything changes on any one device it changes on all of them.
The iCloud is serviced from three data centres the latest of which2 is a 500 000 square foot facility in Maiden North Carolina five times the size of an existing 109 000 square foot facility in Newark California and represents an investment of somewhere between $500 million and one billion dollars.
At the same time Microsoft have announced upgrades to the X Box 360 including the ability to access live TV programs from Sky TV in the UK, Canal+ in France and Foxtel in Australia with presumably the intention of inking similar deals with providers in the USA and in parallel started marketing the Microsoft My Cloud.3
In May 2011 Microsoft spent $8 billion dollars buying the Skype telephone service and rumours in the Press started circulating about their intent to buy Nokia's handset business, ...
