The early years of the digital media revolution promised an unprecedented era of content freedom. Consumers had the power to play vast libraries of video and music on an armada of different devices. Someone just had to make syncing it all easy. Apple realized the opportunity early, and their foresight soon transformed into a billion dollar business. Few remember that the original iTunes was essentially a re-engineered version of SoundJam MP, a music software company Apple acquired in 2000. Most also forget that iTunes didn’t support the original iPod when it launched. That feature came with update 2.0, and it helped kick start the iPod into a global phenomenon.
Today, another personal media sea-change is afoot. Improved broadband and cellular data networks have removed concerns around limited local storage and now offer consumers access to troves of movies, TV shows and music any time they’re online. Thanks to services like Netflix Instant and Spotify, the need to own a particular piece of content may soon be a pointless compulsion in the face of unlimited access. Most of us aren’t there yet, though.
For most consumers still clinging to content ownership, Apple’s relatively new iTunes in the Cloud product tiptoes towards an untethered future, especially for Cupertino cult members who’ve amassed most of their digital library from the iTunes store. But it still leaves plenty to be desired, particularly for those dabbling in other digital ecosystems.
Movies and TV shows are clearly Qvivo’s true strong suit, largely because equivalent services simply don’t exist.
Qvivo is a new cloud media service startup that succeeds where most others have failed in offering a dream streaming solution for video and music fans with large digital libraries. Starting at $1.99 a month, Qvivo offers unlimited cloud storage for movies, tv shows and music that can then be streamed through any modern web browser. For an extra dollar a month, users can access their content hordes across a host of free apps for iPhone, iPad and Android. At $4.99, Qvivo’s premium service adds priority content upload speeds and the ability to share accounts with up to four family members. If it all sounds simple, it is.
In fact, Qvivo’s laser focus on simplicity is its biggest differentiation. Building your Qvivo library in the cloud is a largely painless process. iTunes users can simply drag files from their library into the Qvivo app to immediately start uploading, or alternatively select a media folder from their desktop. While upload speeds will always vary by connection, the software deftly handles large file queues in the background; this makes setting up large batches of content to transfer overnight or at other off hours easy. Metadata for movies is automatically added on upload as well, along with a movie poster and background image, creating an elegant browsing experience on the fly. The same goes for music album artwork.
Theres’s no need to worry whether your local files will be compatible across various devices, platforms and screen resolutions: Qvivo automatically compresses and encodes all content into a variety of formats to ensure universal playback and optimal performance. That may disappoint video and audio nuts who take pride in format snobbery, but for the average user who just wants things to work seamlessly, it’s an enormous plus.