iTunes Festival is back

The iTunes Festival is back for another year. This is a series of concerts, performed in London, that you can watch on your iOS device (iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch). It is free and you can AirPlay the concerts to your Apple TV. The concerts run most everyday through September. Artists this year include Usher, Deadmau5, Emeli Sande, Laura Jones, Matchbox Twenty, Hot Chip, and Mumford & Sons.

You can download the app (or update your current version of the app) here. (iTunes link)

Streaming movie of the week

English: at San Marino/Imola Grand Prix in 1989.

Ayrton Senna. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I just watched a documentary called Senna. It follows the career of one of the best drivers in the history of the Formula One, Ayrton Senna. I am not a particular fan of sports documentaries, but this movie grabs you and won’t let go.

It is available via Netflix streaming or for rental on Apple TV for $.99 as the iTunes movie of the week.

Here is the trailer:

iCloud and Apple IDs

Configuring and using iCloud can be tricky for some, especially if you are in a multi-Apple ID household or have used one MobileMe or DotMac account for syncing and a separate account for iTunes store purchases. The best summary of your options that I have found is this article from Macworld. It is a great reference for handling a multitude of scenarios.

IOS 4.3 or better

If you are running iOS 4.3 or better (on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch) and you go to either the App Store or the iTunes store on such devices, you will find a new button called “Purchased.”  Pushing this button will list the apps or the songs (depending on the store) that you have purchased and it can also show you which of our purchased items are not on the device. From that list you with the touch of a “cloud” button you can quickly download anything you want to access. Viva iCloud.  The iTunes store is now in the cloud.

Via This is My Next … here is video:

iCloud

Business Week claims to have some interesting details about Apple’s long-rumored music/cloud service that will likely launch sometime in June.

Armed with licenses from the music labels and publishers, Apple will be able to scan customers’ digital music libraries in iTunes and quickly mirror their collections on its own servers, say three people briefed on the talks. If the sound quality of a particular song on a user’s hard drive isn’t good enough, Apple will be able to replace it with a higher-quality version. Users of the service will then be able to stream, whenever they want, their songs and albums directly to PCs, iPhones, iPads, and perhaps one day even cars. And the music industry gets a chance at the next best thing after selling shrink-wrapped CDs: monthly subscription fees, à la Netflix (NFLX) and the cable companies. “We will come to a point in the not-so-distant future when we’ll look back on the 99¢ download as anachronistic as cassette tapes or 8-tracks,” says Ross Crupnick, a music analyst at NPD Group.

Tech quote of the day

Andy Ihnatko at MacWorld 2008. This image was ...

Andy Ihnatko

I still lean towards the conclusion that fundamentally, the announcement relates to an expansion of content availability.

Andy Ihnatko, one of the finest Apple analysts around, on Apple’s home page announcement that there is big iTunes news tomorrow. The announcement could be something huge, but I would put a lot of weight behind Ihnatko’s hunch in this situation. In effect, it is that The Beatles are going online for the first time via iTunes.  I safely can say that I will not remember tomorrow if that is the the essence of the announcement by Apple.

iTunes store hacked (updated)

It looks like the iTunes store (or at least the Apps portion of the store) has been hacked. The reports are that a number of users have had their accounts used to purchase “books” written by a sketchy developer.

You probably should take a look at your account’s recent history to see if you have any unexpected purchases showing.  From iTunes, just click on your account name in the upper right of the screen, log in and then click the “Purchase History” button.

Apple will certainly credit wrongful charges, but there is no word yet from Apple on this issue.

Update: A closer review seems to indicate that this is not a major issue, but more likely related to a relatively small number of iTunes accounts that have been compromised by guessing usernames and passwords.

iTunes winner gets a call from Steve Jobs

The winner of the $10,000 iTunes gift card (received for downloading the 10 Billions song from iTunes) got a personal call from Steve Jobs. The winner didn’t believe it, at first.

When Steve Jobs personally called Woodstock, Georgia native Louie Sulcer to tell him he’d won Apple’s iTunes Store 10 Billion Song Sold contest, Sulcer first thought was that he was being pranked. “He called me and said, ‘This is Steve Jobs from Apple.’ I said, ‘Yeah right,’ ” Sulcer tells Rolling Stone.