Google unveils 'Google Play'

Google kicked off its cloud-based entertainment initiative "Google Play" today, serving as a central location for PCs, Android tablets, and Android phones to access music, movies, eBooks, and games.

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Google ramped up its game plans today, with the announcement of Google Play. The cloud-based service serves as a single log-in hub for entertainment across devices, including music, eBooks, movies, and of course, Android apps and games. The new initiative is kicking off today and drawing together the Android Market, Google Music, and Google eBookstore.

The Google blog announced the new initiative. The free storage space provides for up to 20,000 songs among its media offerings, with a library of millions to purchase. The US is the only area to include all four media types, and other regions differ slightly. The blog claims its goal is to roll out new content types moving forward.

The launch is being kicked off with a sale for the next week, which will feature a different album, book, video rental, and Android app each day. Today's titles include Now That's What I Call Music 41, the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the film Puncture, and the app Where's My Water for 25 cents each. Other games are on sale for 49 cents this week as well.

It's an ambitious project, aimed at making life easier for the consumer. As the music industry showed us not long ago, removing barriers results in sales. Android's major competition has been the Apple iOS market. Using the Google log-in as a backbone to challenge iOS markets will heat up the mobile race, and may put even more pressure on dedicated devices like the Nintendo 3DS and recently launched PlayStation Vita.

You can start using the service now, as Google has opened its own dedicated page.

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  • reply
    March 6, 2012 11:30 AM

    Steve Watts posted a new article, Google unveils 'Google Play'.

    Google kicked off its cloud-based entertainment initiative "Google Play" today, serving as a central location for PCs, Android tablets, and Android phones to access music, movies, eBooks, and games.

    • reply
      March 6, 2012 12:40 PM

      i still dont get what's new in this !!

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      March 6, 2012 1:40 PM

      apart from android are people still willing to use google services since there new privacy terms?

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        March 6, 2012 1:43 PM

        What exactly is so bad about their new terms? I think a lot of people don't even know what they changed.

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          March 7, 2012 2:38 AM

          Uhh, they now keep everything you do forever? Other then that?

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            March 7, 2012 2:57 AM

            You can turn that stuff off....

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            March 7, 2012 4:14 AM

            it's anonymised after 18 months, isn't it? anyway, that bit hasn't changed much, the big change was pooling data from multiple services

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      March 6, 2012 1:57 PM

      It could still be prettier and easier to use...Needs breadcrumbs for example, etc, etc.

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      March 7, 2012 1:12 AM

      Google makes some of the best marketing videos.

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      March 7, 2012 2:02 AM

      It's ironic how they called it 'Play' when in most countries around the world there are no Movies, TV or Music purchase options.

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