Acer Goes After iTunes with Alive Content Store, Clear.fi Sharing

Acer is looking to not only provide the hardware you consume your media on, but the media you consume as well. At the company’s global press conference today, it introduced the Alive platform, a digital content discovery portal where users will be able to find and purchase media and apps for their devices.

The alive store will have five sections:

• Listen: The music store, which will start with over 8 million songs.
• Read: The book store
• Play: The game store
• Watch: The video store, which will start with over 2,000 movies
• Applications: A store with all kinds of software

Acer hopes to differentiate Alive from competitors like iTunes by making it real-time (using live feeds), Global (optimized for different markets), and social (includes social networking integration). Providers will also be able to sort content into channels based on interest (ex: comic books) and users will be able to follow channels to find content they are interested in.

The service will launch in December in the UK and Italy on Windows 7 based systems and will be rolled out in Europe, the U.S., and Asia by end of Q1 2011. We look forward to trying the service to get a better feel for how it all looks.

To help users share content between their devices, Acer also introduced its new Clear.fi wireless streaming system. Any Clear.fi device will automatically other Clear.fi-enabled devices on the same home network and put thmbnails and shortcuts to photos, videos, and music into one combined library they all share.

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