Amazon Cloud Drive Is Autonomic’s First Digital Locker Offering

Autonomic Controls is testing integration support for Amazon’s Cloud Drive service, which the company plans to release for its MMS-2 and MMS-5 Mirage Media servers in Q2, the company said Monday. Autonomic is testing support internally for Cloud Drive and expects to deliver free firmware updates to consumers within 60 days. The company is extending beta testing to qualified Autonomic dealers for in-house trials with demo MMS-5 media server systems, CEO Michael de Nigris told us.

Autonomic is focused on the CEDIA space and has no direct relationships with consumers. The company engineered Nuvo Technologies’ MPS4 and MPS4-E music ports and is working with Colorado vNet on a media-streaming device. Two other design projects are in the works, de Nigris told us. The company has control integration agreements with Crestron, AMX, Universal Remote Control, RTI and Control4 so its music port products can be managed by the companies’ control systems.

There’s no technological limit to the number of cloud-based services a media streaming device can deliver, de Nigris said, but “there could be a practical limit.” He expects consumers to settle for “more than one and less than five” cloud-based services in the future. Users may have different cloud accounts for different uses, he said. Supporting a cloud-based service is similar to supporting a brand of hard drive “so you want to support all of the popular ones,” he said. “We won’t support them all.” When choosing future cloud services, Autonomic will consider critical mass and consumers’ ability to buy music that goes directly into the cloud account, the amount of storage offered and the cost of storage for the consumer, he said. Amazon’s model appealed to Autonomic because it provides the storage and is also the source for media. For consumers, that means “you don’t have to go through the extra step of downloading the content from Amazon and uploading it to another cloud-service provider,” he said. As soon as consumers check out of Amazon, the music is in their locker, available to their Autonomic media server and available for playback on any of their portable devices “instantly, without any synchronization,” he said. “I can see a time when people have relationships with various providers depending on what kind of media they obtain from each,” he said.

Autonomic’s Mirage servers also support online services including Pandora, TuneIn Radio and Sirius XM Internet Radio. Each serves a role, de Nigris said, and he expects the various services to co-exist long-term. Consumers not looking for a particular song will tune to a genre-oriented radio channel on a service like Pandora, he said. Despite advanced aggregation features, the model of being able to plug in an artist or track name and not know where it originated probably won’t occur, de Nigris said, because service providers “want consumers to know who is supplying the music.”