Hasta La Creative!

Video Podcasts: The Sleeping Giant on AppleTV
January 16, 2008
While Steve Jobs talked for a long time Tuesday at Macworld Expo about the movie rental feature of iTunes and Apple TV, he spent only a short time demonstrating its capabilities for podcasts. In fact, the ability of Apple TV to view podcasts may in the long run be its most important feature.

“Huh,” you say, thinking that podcasts are Wayne’s World run amok. But in Apple’s world, podcasts are any free video and audio programs. They are usually organized as a series to which you can subscribe, but you can also choose one program at a time.

Until now, podcasts have been programs to download and watch later, usually on an iPod (hence the name). But the online demo of the Apple TV podcast feature shows that programs can be played on demand.

Suddenly, this lets any TV connected to the $229 Apple TV box display any of tens of thousands of programs from the Internet. Readers of this blog have heard it before that free, ad-supported Web video will ultimately dwarf the $1.99-per-show downloads that Apple is selling.

Apple has no restrictions on distributing podcasts that have advertising in them. Indeed, Dina Kaplan, the chief operating officer of Blip.TV, which distributes advertising-supported video programming, says Apple has gone out of its way to help support its advertising technology. The New York Times’ Saul Hansell blogs

 no longer do you need to spend $15.00 on a movie you just want to “check out”…which I almost did only 2 days ago… v