By now, it should be obvious that Apple has eyes on cloud-based media, particularly for iTunes music. After acquiring the iCloud.com domain and now reports that two of the big four music labels have signed up, along comes a new patent discovery dating back to late 2009 that starts to bring Cupertino’s plans into focus.
Patently Apple is reporting on the discovery of an Apple patent application dating back to late 2009 which seems to confirm that not only is the company putting some grand ambitions on cloud-based streaming, but they also plan to tackle it in their usual user-friendly way -- especially when compared to current offerings from Amazon and Google which are quite the opposite.
Apple’s patent describes a “seamless and invisible to the user” method which essentially allows a mobile device to cache part of a music track or video file on the device itself, which is then played as the rest is being buffered from a cloud server in the background. The concept would presumably offer the best of both worlds -- “instant on” playback from an internet connection, while requiring much less local storage space.
“This invention is directed to playing back streamed media items using an electronic device,” Patently Apple reveals. “In particular, this is directed to locally storing one or more clips corresponding to a media item such that the clips can be immediately played back in response to a user request to play back the media item. While the clips are played back, the electronic device can retrieve the remaining segments of the media item from the user's media library as a media stream over a communications network. Once the playback of the clip is complete, the electronic device can seamlessly switch playback to the media stream received from the user's library. The electronic device can authenticate with the remote library using any suitable approach, including for example one or more passwords and tokens.”
Apple’s patent includes the diagram above, which clearly shows a new option intended for a future version of iTunes called “Sync partial music,” with an option to the right for “Minimum Connection Speed.” In this case, a 3G connection (or less) would be required to initiate the option and more of the content would be cached -- anything faster, such as a Wi-Fi connection in the home, would stream without it.
If it all sounds potentially complicated, that’s because it is -- but we’re guessing by the time Apple actually implements this, it will work as seamlessly as users have come to expect from Cupertino. How soon it will be implemented is anyone’s guess…
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(Image courtesy of Patently Apple)
