The Cloud Is Here – But Not For iTunes

Yesterday at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show – that’s CES to gear heads – RealNetworks, the company that helped introduce music streaming back in 1995, unveiled a cloud-based music service.

After months of consumers and tech insiders waiting for Apple or Google to release a cloud solution for music – and one notable false alarm from Apple – RealNetworks has jumped the gun on their bigger rivals, who have been weighed down heavily in legalities with record labels in trying to launch a cloud model.

The new service, dubbed Unifi – sounds a little like Spotify? – will store photos, videos, and music in a unified center, like a cross between iTunes and Spotify. With one catch: none of the space on your hard drive is taken up.

Even better, the cloud allows a user to access content that may have previously been stored on multiple computers and devices from one place on the web.

Unifi is slated for public release some time early this year. Watch a video about how the new service works below.