Why is My Media for Alexa charged as a subscription instead of a one-off?
Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2018 8:03 pm
We often get asked why My Media is charged as a subscription rather than a single one off app download or even free.
Firstly - remember we are not affiliated/associated/paid for by Amazon. We are a completely independent company who wants to help users listen to their music easily with Alexa devices, particularly since Amazon has stopped support for uploading your own music to Amazon Music. We wanted to give users another solution.
As an independent company, we need to charge something for My Media - it's taken a considerable amount of R&D, development and testing to reach this level of maturity.
The reason we charge a subscription instead of a one off charge is that we need to pay for ongoing cloud services for each My Media Server. Our My Media Cloud Servers sit between the My Media Server app (that runs on your computer) and Alexa's own cloud services. When you make a My Media skill request to Alexa, the voice request is sent from your Echo device to Amazon's servers for initial processing. The request then gets sent to our servers where we do further processing and match it against your My Media Server based on your Amazon linked ID. That request is then picked up by your My Media server which checks its index of your media for the tracks to play, returns the results to our servers which returns the results to Amazon's servers which returns the results to your Echo device. Yes! There's a lot of hops, but these are architectural constrains of the Alexa service.
So our servers need to scale based on the number of concurrent users using My Media and this will grow over time. If you carry on using My Media (which we hope you do!) we need to pay for our server time to support your requests.
We hope that the price of My Media for Alexa - which equates to about one reassuringly expensive beer per year - is sufficiently accessible that this doesn't dissuade people from using our service.
Firstly - remember we are not affiliated/associated/paid for by Amazon. We are a completely independent company who wants to help users listen to their music easily with Alexa devices, particularly since Amazon has stopped support for uploading your own music to Amazon Music. We wanted to give users another solution.
As an independent company, we need to charge something for My Media - it's taken a considerable amount of R&D, development and testing to reach this level of maturity.
The reason we charge a subscription instead of a one off charge is that we need to pay for ongoing cloud services for each My Media Server. Our My Media Cloud Servers sit between the My Media Server app (that runs on your computer) and Alexa's own cloud services. When you make a My Media skill request to Alexa, the voice request is sent from your Echo device to Amazon's servers for initial processing. The request then gets sent to our servers where we do further processing and match it against your My Media Server based on your Amazon linked ID. That request is then picked up by your My Media server which checks its index of your media for the tracks to play, returns the results to our servers which returns the results to Amazon's servers which returns the results to your Echo device. Yes! There's a lot of hops, but these are architectural constrains of the Alexa service.
So our servers need to scale based on the number of concurrent users using My Media and this will grow over time. If you carry on using My Media (which we hope you do!) we need to pay for our server time to support your requests.
We hope that the price of My Media for Alexa - which equates to about one reassuringly expensive beer per year - is sufficiently accessible that this doesn't dissuade people from using our service.