June 7, 2005

Most overlooked WWDC ’05 news

I’m listening/watching the stream from the Apple WWDC ’05 and my ears perked up when Steve Jobs started talk­ing about Podcasting.

Everyone’s talk­ing about the Intel bomb — my take: don’t worry about it. OS X will be OS X no matter what archi­tec­ture it’s run­ning on. Plus cross-platform/Web devel­op­ers should be happy about the (unsup­ported) pos­si­bil­ity of dual-​booting.

But what caught my atten­tion was Jobs’ men­tion that there’d be a Pod­cast direc­tory in the iTunes Music Store.

Now, this is an innocu­ous start, but I wonder how soon we’ll see some way for Pod­cast­ers to make money through the iTMS.

I doubt most folks would pay per-​download for Pod­casts, but a small, optional, sub­scrip­tion charge could supplement/supplant the PayPal dropslot.

Or imag­ine if Apple offers to insert brief ads in their pod­casts auto­mat­i­cally, and cut them in on a per­cent­age of the buy.

Ide­ally, for both par­ties, there should be a way to set up affil­i­ate links to the iTMS for any songs in your Pod­cast that are also in the store.

I’m not sure what it’ll be, but with Pod­casts sit­ting inside a proven micro-​payment appli­ca­tion, some­thing inter­est­ing is sure to happen.

Filed under: Technology

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