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Apple assimilates France, Sweden and pals into iCloud
Europeans - lower your shields and surrender ...
Finnish, Belgian and Cypriot fanbois are among a group of European and Nordic Apple users who woke up today to find themselves able to share films with iCloud. The cloudy service, which stores your content and wirelessly pushes it to all your Apple kit, allows users to access their previously purchased movies and music. If they purchased it from the fruity Store, of course.
Altogether, Cupertino has extended the ability to share iTunes films between devices to 11 more countries, an update to Apple's iTunes service page has revealed.
Previously in these countries only music and apps could be shared between devices over iTunes.
Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway and Sweden have all received the service update. The reason for the staggered rollout of the service across these countries was that Cupertino had to renegotiate licensing deals with several content providers as well as ensure the service conformed with local copyright laws. The service has not been rolled out in Germany, where Motorola Mobility won a permanent injunction against iCloud after a battle with Apple over a patent on pushed notifications - which it says it owns just as much as Apple owns slide-to-unlock.
Shunting films in and out of the cloud will put a greater call on the iCloud's storage space, but it allows the owners of several Apple devices to punt their content around from screen to screen, for example, if you bought Die Hard on your Mac, now you can watch it on your iPad.
It's all part of Apple's attempt to make iCloud indispensable and to create the Apple home - where all (Apple) devices serve as portals to the Apple media entertainment universe.
The French will also be able to punt TV series into the cloud. Only users in Australia, Canada, the UK, the US and now France can download TV shows as well for iTunes in the Cloud. ®