According to CNET, Google will unveil its ‘Music Beta’ cloud service at the I/O Developer Conference later today. While the free service will remain invite only during its initial launch, Google plans to offer the ability to upload as many as 20,000 songs onto Google servers and stream said multimedia to multiple home and mobile devices.
Sounds great, right? Wrong. Google’s preemptive strike against ‘iCloud’ is incompatible with all iOS devices because the free service will require Flash Player support. While this means the service will work on most computers and Android devices, Apple enthusiasts will be forced to use alternative services for a true cloud computing experience.
iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users are not out of luck considering Amazon’s recently updated ‘Cloud Player’ service and the Apple’s rumored ‘iCloud’ multimedia solution.
Similar to Amazon, Google has not officially secured licensing deals with major music labels before launching its music streaming service.