Music streaming from Apple's MobileMe? Not really

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 05 August 2010 16:25

Opinion and Analysis

There's been a kerfuffle about Apple enabling the playback of audio files directly from MobileMe's iDisk, and how this may be the first sign of a Apple streaming service resulting from the company's acquisition of Lala.

The fuss over iDisk and streaming music appears to be traceable to a blog post from MP3.com and MP3tunes founder Michael Robertson, in which he drew attention to the way Apple quietly gave the latest version of the iDisk app (for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch) the ability to play audio from iDisk.

Robertson observed "This is not 'iTunes in the cloud' but it is definitely moving the Cupertino company in that direction." The first part of that statement is accurate, but I'm not so sure about the second.

Leaving the app aside for the moment, let's consider iDisk itself. It's basically just remote storage that's accessible via WebDAV (or, as Apple puts it, "an iDisk is just a WebDAV server, and WebDAV is just HTTP"), so it appears to programs just like any other storage volume.

So when a device (whether that's an iOS device running the new app, or a computer connecting via WebDAV) plays an audio file stored on an iDisk, all it's doing is downloading the file, playing it, and (possibly) throwing the data away afterwards.

As far as I can see, there's none of the speed negotiation and so on that's normally associated with streaming. The two ends don't negotiate in any way ("oh, the buffer's getting too empty, so switch to a lower bit-rate version"), if you skip forwards you have to wait until the download has progressed to the required point, but if you skip backwards the audio restarts immediately because that part of the data has already been received.

So when Robertson stated that "Their [Apple's] recent actions are defying UMG's [Universal Music Group's] position that any streaming service requires a license," he's missing the point that there is no streaming going on: iDisk is just generic remote storage. The fact that the iDisk app can download and play audio files in the background does not of itself constitute streaming.

The idea that a licence might be needed in these circumstances reminds me of something. Find out what on page 2.