Apple Beats Competition in Cloud Media Usage

As media consumption is moving to mobile devices, services that let us stream content from the cloud are becoming increasingly important. Services such as Apple’s iCloud, Amazon’s Cloud Drive allow users to seamlessly sync the music, books or videos they purchased across multiple devices.

According to data published by Strategy Analytics, Apple’s cloud services iCloud and iTunes Match are currently the most popular ones in the United States: Of the 2,285 internet users surveyed in October 2012, 27% had used Apple’s services. Dropbox, which has no associated content ecosystem, came in second at 17%, followed by Amazon’s Cloud Drive at 15%. Despite the huge popularity of Android, Google Drive had only been used by 10% of the respondents.

Overall, the transition to cloud services is still ongoing: only 45% of the respondents had ever used any cloud service to store their media, a percentage that is expected to grow vastly in the near future.