A company called mSpot beat Google and Amazon to the punch a few years ago by offering an online music storage locker that allows users to upload songs to the cloud and stream them to any desktop web browser or to mobile devices for Android or iOS. Now mSpot is stepping up its game by combining its music locker service with an internet radio service.

Here’s how it works: You upload your music, fire up the app on your mobile device and start listening to the songs you already own. But when you want to listen to something new you just tap a button and mSpot will create a personalized internet radio station based on the song or artist you’re currently listening to. It’s sort of like Pandora, but you don’t have to manually enter a search term. Just let mSpot you want to hear more songs like the one you’re already enjoying. Of course, you can also search manually if you want.

The mSpot Music service also tracks the playlists of existing internet radio stations and sometimes recommends some of these stations as well as the personalized station. The app can also keep track of songs you’ve played recently to get a sense of your listening habits so that it can recommend additional stations you might like from the primary radio menu.

A new mSpot Music beta is available from the Android Market today. An iOS app will follow later.

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Music and movie streaming service mSpot recently launched a new Movies Club which makes it possible to rent new release movies for lower prices than you’d find at Amazon, iTunes, or other online video services. Here’s how it works. You can rent videos one by one at normal prices — usually around $3.99 for a new release. Or you can pay for a monthly subscription which gets you credits to pay for discounted movies.

For instance, the latest Harry Potter movie normally runs $3.99. But if you pay for a subscription plan you can use credits to effectively rent the movie for $3.25.

The monthly plans run $4.99 per month for 20 credits (up to 4 movies), $7.99 for 40 credits (up to 8 movies), or $15.99 for 80 credits (up to 16 movies).

Of course, this is only a good deal if you actually know you’re going to watch that many movies per month. But the advantage to using mSpot as opposed to a stream-all-you-like service such as Netflix is that mSpot gets new release titles faster than Netflix. There’s also no official Netflix app for Android yet, although one is expected soon.

You can download mSpot apps from the Android Market and the iTunes App Store.

via Android Central

Amazon’s Cloud Drive service launched this week, giving any Amazon customer 5GB of free space to store music files online where they can be accessed from any Mac or Windows computer or Android phone or tablet. But a company called mSpot has been offering a similar service since last year. One of the key differences is that mSpot only gave users 2GB of free storage, but today the company has decided to respond to Amazon by increasing its free storage locker to 5GB.

Users can also pay $3.99 per month to get 40GB, which at $47.88 per year is actually still a little more expensive than Amazon’s plan which provides 20GB of disk space for $20, 50GB for $50, and up to 1TB for $1,000 per year. Amazon also stores any songs purchased from Amazon MP4 for free and gives users 20GB of disk space the first time they buy an album from the company’s digital music store.

Still, pushing the amount of free storage from 2GB to 5GB is a smart move on mSpot’s part. Existing users should also be upgraded to the 5GB plan soon. And unlike Amazon, mSpot offers apps fro the iPhone and iPad which allows you to stream music from the cloud to Apple mobile devices.

Earlier this year a company called mSpot launched a service that lets Mac or PC users upload their music collections to the web and then stream that music to an Android phone.  Now mSpot has released an iOS app that lets you stream your music to an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

The mSpot service can grab music and metadata from iTunes or other directories on your computer. You can also enable airplane mode to cache songs on your device for playback when you’re offline, or use the “streaming only” option if you want to save space on your device.

The basic mSpot service is free, but you only get 2GB of storage with the basic plan. You can upgrade to 40GB of storage space for $3.99 per month.

mSpot Music is available as a free download from the App Store. You’ll also need to download a desktop app from mSpot.com. You can also grab the Android version from the Google Android Market.

via TechCrunch

About a month after launching a movie streaming app for Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, and iPhone, mSpot has launched a new version optimized for the Apple iPad. What sets mSpot’s service apart from other solutions such as the Netflix iPad app is that mSpot doesn’t charge a monthly fee — instead you can rent movies for between $2.99 and $3.99.

Once you rent a video, you can immediately start streaming it to your mobile device.

The service works over WiFi or 3G connections, although you’ll typically get higher quality video streams over WiFi. The company also has a web site at mSpotMovies.com which lets you rent and watch movies on a PC. If you have the mobile app, you can also start watching movies on a PC, hit pause, and resume where you left off on a mobile device — or vice versa.

The folks at mSpot have put together a video showing how the new iPad app stacks up against the Netflix app for iPad, which you can check out below. It might be a little biased, but it also gives you an idea of how the app works. Update: The video has been removed

The  mSpot movies app for iPad is available as a free download from the App Store.

Google is expected to launch a service that lets you stream music from your PC to your Android phone eventually. It’s not available yet, but starting today there’s another solution called mSpot.

The mSpot system lets you download an app to your PC or Mac, scan your computer for music files, and upload them to the cloud. Once your music is uploaded, you can use mSpot’s Android client to stream music from your own collection to your phone anywhere you have an internet connection. The service works over 3G or WiFi.

Users get 2GB of storage space for free. If that’s not enough room, you can pay a monthly fee for additional storage for your massive music collection,

You can upload most DRM-free audio tracks, including MP3, MP4, AAC, WMA and WAV. The mSpot Android app is available for Android 2.1 and up. You can also listen to your uploaded tracks from any computer web browser.

While the mSpot support page says there should also be an airplane mode for Android devices, allowing you to listen to songs that have been downloaded from the cloud, I couldn’t find this setting on my mobile app — and it took a little while for songs to start playing over an Edge connection.