DRM Troubles at Apple
 

The Register reports on problems at Apple with DRM on movies.

This kind of problem could easily affect books bought through the iBooks store, since the DRM systems are similar.

And, of course, similar inconveniences could happen with most other DRM systems.

Their MobileMe service was down over the weekend as well for many people. Seems like their transition to iCloud has been a bit rocky.

Not sure how it would easily affect iBooks the same way though.
AppleTV doesn't store anything-it is all streaming, so it has to go to Apple's servers to get movies and TV shows.

iBooks are on your iPad/iPhone. You don't need a connection to read them. It would affect buying them, of course.

This points out a problem with streaming services generally - while it may have been Apple's DRM server that went down this time*, it could just have easily been the content server or account server or credit card processing server that went down.

*Although the theory in the article is that Apple's "DRM server" went down, I don't know if Apple has a dedicated DRM server - I would think that they would have multiple redundant servers for DRM, and that the problem is more complicated than just a server going down.

This is the main reason I've never been super fond of streaming. No real way to control my media.

Yeah, same here. If it's the only way to see something, then I'll deal with it. But, if I can help it at all, I'd prefer not to stream.

Which is why I'm still not a fan of all of this wonderful CLOUD computing. A cloud consists of air and water vapor and sometimes they go BOOM!

I love it. Streaming internet radio is the primary use for my iPod touch. If one station goes down, there's a gazillion others to switch to.

I might be wrong on 1 or 2 of the players, but I believe Apple uses Microsoft and Google resources for their cloud storage.

I stream internet radio on my phone and free videos from Amazon all the time. But if I own it, I want it available on my own hardware.

me too

^This.

That's why 8GB devices are pretty useless without memory expansion.

^ this, too.

I'm generally in favour of cloud (with local cache) solutions - I think the benefits outweigh the disadvantages - however I get as annoyed as the next chap by some of the daft implementations.

Zinio. Love it. Cloud solution, magazines downloaded to my phone. But really... I have to go out of the café to get a 3G signal just to open the app so that I can read the magazines previously downloaded???

Graham

For some things, streaming makes a lot of sense - at my gf's house it takes 2 hours to download a movie to watch on iTunes, but we can start watching the same movie in about a minute on Netflix or Amazon. For this reason, I think that streaming is often the best way to watch movies (although stream now and download later is even better).

But there is no advantage at all to streaming books - they are tiny files, and you can download an 8 hour book in 15 seconds; streaming something like that would just be a waste of time.