At the Wall Street Journal’s D Conference, Steve Jobs tonight showed ipodder-like features in the next release of iTunes, supposedly available within about 60 days. I was glad to see this, since the “architecture of participation” has been the only one of the big Web 2.0 themes that Apple had seemed to be missing. He was slightly dismissive of populist podcasting, describing it as “Wayne’s World for radio”, and celebrating the arrival of professional radio stations into the market, but nonetheless, he was very high on the podcasting phenomenon, and the excitement that millions of users have displayed about it. In the Q&A, Jason Calcanis of Weblogs, Inc. asked if there was any possibility of using the iTunes music store for paid podcasting. Jobs replied that for the moment they were only considering it as free content, but that he was open to looking into it.
Jobs also spoke about the prospect of iTunes on phones, and the difficulties of working with the carriers, saying something like: “As you know from our limited success at getting our computers into the Fortune 500, Apple’s never been very good at going through corporate orifices in order to get at the end users. And if we can’t do it with 500 companies, you can imagine it’s even harder when there are only four.”
On the subject of video features in iTunes, he said it was to play music videos and other bonus material in order to help the music studios promote the sale of albums as well as songs. But when pressed on the subject of whether or not there might eventually be movies for sale, he said “I’m going to have to leave that answer to our actions in the future.” (He did repeat his past comments about the difficulty of creating a good movie experience on small form factor devices.)