By Anton D. Nagy | May 20, 2011 5:42 AM
Apple‘s highly anticipated — and hopefully upcoming — cloud-based music streaming service could very well be the fastest on the market if Cupertino implements one of its patents related to partial media cloud storage for faster content streaming.
According to a patent application entitled “Local Storage of a Portion of Streamed Media Items”, a portion of the music or video file would be stored locally on your device (iPhone) with the rest of it being synced as necessary. This would allow for instant playback without the need to pre-buffer a certain amount of content to allow the playback to begin.
Back in February there was another Apple patent related to merging portions of a file between the locally saved segment and an online part. These two combined together — if, of course, Apple decides to go this way — could bring some innovation to what we currently know as cloud storage and media streaming.
