A new world awaits us among the clouds

It can store your music collection, photos, email and could soon give you instant access to virtually every film or TV programme ever made.

Cloud computing, which stores data on vast internet server "farms" the size of dozens of football pitches rather than on your own PC, is already commonplace with services such as YouTube and Gmail.

However, experts say the technology is now on the verge of changing TV, film and music forever.

Rumours abound that Apple is set to unveil a "cloud" version of iTunes, which would allow people to listen to any song or watch any film or TV show in Apple's library, all without having to wait for a download. The secretive firm trialled a "live streaming" service at its recent iTunes festival in London, allowing iPhone and iPad owners to watch high-quality streams of full concerts live. If this service were expanded to include all the material Apple already has in its library, it could rival traditional TV channels.

Next- generation TVs could have cloud access built in, instead of relying on hard drives to record and replay. The move into the cloud would also allow Apple to take on music services such as Spotify.

In the UK, Carphone Warehouse has already beaten Apple into the cloud with its "music anywhere" service that lets people access music from their home computer via a mobile phone. We tried it on a Google Nexus One handset, and it works relatively well, allowing you to listen to music you have bought at home when you are out and about. At £29.99 a year it's useful, with a neat feature that allows you to download tracks to the handset; plus it has the backing of major record labels. However, it doesn't quite have the ease of use or sound quality of some of its rivals.

With so much of our data heading for the cloud, for consumers the era of the hard drive may soon be over.