Get ready for the Cloud
Australian broadband users want an uber Web storage service to stick their photos, videos, music and movies, says Cisco. Sounds great, but will your broadband plan cope?
The idea was a hit with more than half of the Australian broadband users in a survey commissioned by Cisco (so take the results with a few lumps of salt) and unveiled today, with 52% saying they'd be "very" or "extremely" interested in storing all their digital stuff on a central site.
They were responding to the idea of a "centralized storage" service, where pre-recorded TV programs, full-length movies and photos, and address books can be stored and shared from the same site.
Mind you, there were no additional fees, subscriptions or hardware required in the vision proposed by the survey. Cisco said that's because it wanted to find a baseline of interest in digital media Web services.
We've seen several piecemeal versions of this vision, including the Carbonite online backup service, and to a certain extent, Microsoft's Live platform.
We're loathe to shatter this dream with talk of broadband prices, including some upload charges introduced by certain ISPs over the last 12 months, but clearly something needs to happen if the cloud is to be the future of movies in the home.
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Thoughts on this article? Add a comment below.
Comments: 1
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Arthur K
Jun 11, 2008 9:53 AM
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The opportunity for this kind of service is significant and o/seas demand for services such as Carbonite and Mosy have shown this. There are plenty of ISPs that still don't charge for uploads.
Carbonite's proposition isn't exactly online sharing its more about insuring your work. They will never do sharing as it contradicts their entire security model.
The more these types of services begin to get used by the mainstream the more accepted they will become by ISPs and gradually they will see the need to exclude them from their upload counts. At the moment they are still very new in Australia in terms of general market usage.
This will take work on behalf of groups such as Carbonite. We are starting to do this now. |