Apple’s iCloud will soon have a new contender to take on in the sky.
LG announced today that its new Cloud offering will launch in beta tomorrow. LG Cloud is designed to work on “three screens” — smartphones, PCs, and televisions — and streams everything from video to photos.
In order to access LG Cloud, users must first download the associated app from Google Play on Android-based devices or the LG Smartworld store from LG Smart TVs. A new LG Cloud Web site has been set up for users to access the service from PCs. After downloading the application, LG Cloud automatically synchronizes smartphone content with all of the other clients on separate devices.
LG Cloud is ostensibly the company’s answer to Apple’s cloud-based synching offering, iCloud. However, unlike iCloud, LG Cloud is designed to work on Android-based smartphones. The platform also works with LG’s Smart TVs and PCs.
According to LG, one of Cloud’s chief improvements is its “Real-time Streaming Transcoding” technology, which converts files on the server side, rather than on the device. By doing so, the individual devices a user has don’t need codecs or converters to play content.
“Most companies today only see the cloud as a storage device or in the case of YouTube or Flickr, only for one type of content,” LG Home Entertainment president and CEO Havis Kwon said today in a statement, adding that “tomorrow’s consumers don’t want to go to one cloud for music, another cloud for video, another location for photos and yet another cloud for their office files.”
LG Cloud will come with 5GB of free storage. In addition, users who have purchased an LG Smart TV or LG smartphone can receive 50GB of free storage for six months. The company will charge customers who want more than 5GB for additional storage. Pricing on the additional storage will be announced at a later time.