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Disney+ downloads will disappear when they leave the service (updated)
While Disney leans hard on nostalgia for content from its vast archives to push its upcoming Disney+ package, one downside is that licensing deals signed years ago will mean some movies aren't always available. In the past, it's made limited availability of content part of the business model, rotating classics in and out of the Disney vault to encourage purchases while they're available. As CEO Bob Iger explained during an interview at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit 2019, that shouldn't be an issue -- as long as people keep subscribing. Asked about the availability of older movies (around 25 minutes into the video below), he referenced the three-hour "All Your Favorites" sizzle reel Disney released last week, and said that there is "some of it but very very little" that will be removed from the service at times. However, as long as someone is an active Disney+ subscriber, he said, they'll be able to watch downloaded copies of those movies anyway. It's not the perfect solution, but it may nudge some people to get -- and keep -- that annual subscription, even in future years if Disney ever raises the prices. Disney+ launches November 12th, with a $6.99 per month / $69.99 annual price tag. Update 11:30AM ET: It seems that Iger's statements have caused some confusion. While he seemed to be suggesting that any videos you downloaded from Disney+ would continue to be available as long as you were a subscriber, regardless of changes in licensing or things going back in the "vault" so to speak, that's not necessarily the case. A Disney spokesperson clarified to The Verge that, if a movie or show leaves the Disney+ platform, then it will no longer be available as a download. To give you the full context of Iger's statement, we've included a transcript below. Q: I have a quick, you mentioned the breadth of content and you kind of, you guys exploded the internet, I think it was last week, with this incredible flex of everything from the vault. Now I grew up in the tradition of the Disney vault, you know the movie would come out and then it would go back in the vault, and if you didn't get it, it was gone. So I'm just curious as the mother of a five year old, is the stuff gonna stay on Disney Plus or are you gonna take The Love Bug away? A: No, no, no. What you're referring to they've someone in our marketing department decided to put out a trailer which I think was a snippet from every one of the movies and television shows that will be on and it was a three and a half hour trailer. It was kind of inventive although I have not gotten through it all yet. Virtually all of the library is on Disney Plus and will be available. There's some encumbrances from deals that we had, legacy deals that we had before, which will prevent some of it from being on initially, and will cause some of it but very very little to come off for brief periods of time. But by and large, almost all of it is there. And if you are a subscriber, you can download it and put it on a device and it will stay on that device as long as you continue to subscribe. So in your case if you wanted to download 10 classic Disney films that may not have all been available at once before, you can do that basically fill all of your hard drive space on one of your devices and your child can watch wherever they are.
StreamNation shuts down its cloud media service on March 8th
Are you one of the early adopters who gave StreamNation a shot? If you did, you'll want to sit up and take notice. The company is shutting down its namesake personal-media-in-the-cloud service (along with Shutter) on March 8th. You can move any photos and videos to Picturelife, which will be sticking around, but music and other files will bite the bullet after that date. Don't despair, though -- this isn't the usual service shutdown, strictly speaking.
StreamNation's digital-media locker overhaul focuses on mobile music
You've got to hand it to tech companies lately: they've been awfully keen on taking user feedback to heart and addressing any shortcomings in their services. The latest to do so is the digital-media locker outfit StreamNation. The firm has launched a completely overhauled website and mobile apps, and in doing so retconned features of the old ones that weren't quite up to snuff. Because the new access points were apparently built from scratch, StreamNation says that's why the service currently missing stuff like a search feature and a content management system on iOS. Same goes for DTS and Dolby Digital audio support. Users on Apple's mobile OS do get offline music playback as well as support for in-car listening via AirPlay, Bluetooth and USB. Oh, and a retooled Chromecast experience is supposedly in the works as well. Have any suggestions for bits and bobs you'd like added? Let the team know -- it's listening.
StreamNation copies all your cloud media into a central hub
Joining multiple cloud services is great for maxing out your storage, but keeping on top of all them can be a chore. StreamNation's latest update may help you untangle all that by allowing you to copy your media from Dropbox, Flickr, Instagram, Google Drive and others into its own app. Content can be directly uploaded from those programs straight through their respective APIs without tying up your connection. Once copied over, you can then stream or share them with anyone who's also signed up to the service and even lend them out. To fit all of those files in, StreamNation will give you 5GB of storage for free, or more if you're willing to invite your friends or flood your social feeds with endorsements. Otherwise, plans start at $4 a month for 100GB, and go up to $19 month for unlimited storage. We tried the iOS and web versions of StreamNation ourselves, and found it a breeze to add local files or media from services like Google+ or Dropbox. However, since it creates a second copy of your cloud files, you may need as much space on StreamNation as all your other services combined. Still, if the convenience of being able to share any file from a central location outweighs those drawbacks, you can now sign up at the source.
Streamnation cracks open your digital TV and movie stash for online sharing
Digital movies and TV shows have a long way to go before they're as easy to share as an MP3. To that end, the cloud storage service Streamnation may have created a solution. You can now upload your own movies and TV shows to the digital locker service and lend them to whoever you want, so long as they also have a Streamnation account. Folks enjoying your videos have 24 hours to stream them across a number of popular devices, and during that period you can't view the media yourself. In that way, it's a lot like borrowing them a DVD or Blu-ray. The whole thing sounds an awful lot like Steam's sharing program, but the difference here is that historically, Hollywood tends to operate differently than the game industry when it comes to passing content around.
A look at apps with waiting lists
The way we look at new app launches is changing thanks to the cloud. Rather than a full-scale launch that invites everyone to download and try an app, developers are rolling out their apps slowly, opting for a waiting list that meters access to a service. Several high profile apps recently used this new wait list paradigm and The Verge chatted with them about their experience. The conversation focuses on the challenges of storing data remotely and dealing with the unexpected outliers who push a service beyond its tested limits. "Two hundred and fifty [beta testers] is a decent data set, but when you increase that several orders of magnitude you find edge cases," said Mailbox CEO Gentry Underwood. Underwood notes that Mailbox was not prepared for that one user who tried to transfer 40,000 messages into the service on launch day and caused the Mailbox servers to almost buckle under the load. You can read additional commentary from Loom CEO Jan Senderek and Jonathan Benassaya, CEO of Stream Nation in The Verge article.
Stream Nation goes global, offers private video sharing with no playback limits
At some point, competition and catch-up should iron out many of the differences between rival cloud storage platforms. For now though, each option focuses on slightly different things, and Stream Nation's main specialism is private video streaming, which it has just made accessible to users in the US, UK and elsewhere. Unlike Flickr Pro or Dropbox, for example, there's no limit to the length or file size of a video clip that can be streamed to someone else's browser. The service's founder, Jonathan Benassaya, who also co-founded Deezer, says he originally designed it to help him share vacation videos with his family. Then again, there are few hold-ups to consider: you need to install an uploader application to store photos and videos, unless you're grabbing them from Dropbox or elsewhere on the web, and from our experience the whole process is rather slow -- it took a good 20 minutes to encode a 90MB clip we brought over from Dropbox. Furthermore, you can only share a video with people who are also registered on Stream Nation, and you have to pay for anything over 2GB (or suffer the indignity of inviting all your Google contacts, which nets you a bonus 8GB). So yeah, this won't suit everyone, especially if they need unlimited space or if their friends and family are savvy enough to know what to do with a Dropbox link, but it might just come in handy.
