So apparently our friends at my favorite fruit company are out after "revolutionary" patents and marketing headlines. Over on Geeky Gadgets and other sites they have reported that, in advance of an iCloud announcement, Apple has filed for a patent optimizing track buffering performance over streaming services by caching portions of the songs to your internal memory (schematic below). The idea being that if the first few seconds of everything in your cloud library is cached locally (maybe cleverly managed by play count statistics) then when you jump to the next track there will be no streaming lag. Apple, when they finally launch a cloud streaming service, will tout this as the coolest, newest, most revolutionary thing to hit streaming music since, well, streaming music. Problem is they are about 4 years behind on this point if not more.
Spotify does this today and has been using this methodology, albeit better, since their inception. I remember being in a meeting with Spotify reps early on when they were pitching this new concept to our team in order to ingrate it into our handsets. Groundbreaking then. Proven success now. Spotify's version, however, uses a structure similar to torrents where not only do they cache a large portion of your cloud playlists locally - but what is not available locally on your device is cloud-sourced among other Spotify users that are online, thus accelerating the startup time for every track.
So I have a hard time seeing how Apple can legitimately get a patent for this but stranger things have occurred in patent land. All in all, for me, it seems yet another indicator that Apple, despite its immense success, is struggling with the disruption of other services to their long, tired, ecosystem. I love Apple, and Steve is God in the tech world, but I wonder how much his illness is beginning to ripple into operations and visions. Let's keep an open eye on that one.
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