I can see this happening...
I read the recent Cringley post:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080801_005339.html
and it seemed pretty logical...
What if the chips would be applied "across the entire line" quote means the entire line of Apple products that display or process video, including: iPhone, AppleTV, some iPods, as well as Mac computers.
YouTube changed its codec to h264 to support the iPhone (resulting in better quality, smaller files, less bandwidth). Could other social sites find advantage in doing the same.
For instance, consider the site
http://live.yahoo.com/
This site offers AV Lifecasting in real time. It features a live 400x300 video of the primary broadcaster and live videos of, up to 4, 160x120 concurrent secondary broadcasters.
Anyone can sign up, setup a free lifecast channel and go live in minutes. The channel content includes: gossips, goof-offs, entertainers, news, security monitoring...
Currently, this is all delivered with Flash (unavailable on the iPhone) and probably not practical on most mobile devices. What if, Yahoo saw an advantage in offer h264 streaming to enable practical use of the site for mobile devices?
As a real-world example, there is a site I visit every week:
http://live.yahoo.com/sheenatv
It features Sheena Melwani an up and coming singer/composer/musician doing a live broadcast & AV chat at 5:30 - 6:30 PM PDT every Monday. The audience includes a group of 20-30 regulars and 40 or more drop-ins.
But, soccer season has begun for the 3 grandkids & the 2 boys have practice 4:30 - 7:00 (with driving). I can't use my iPhone to access the site (Flash) and there is no WiFi in the middle of the park. I am investigating using the iPhone to tether my MacBook, or using the iPhone via a VPN to a iMac at home... the latter works better but has no audio.
What I would really like is to view SheenaTV directly on the iPhone over EDGE so I could tune in, watch, listen and chat whenever the opportunity was available.
Maybe a future iPhone rev would even allow me to [broadcast] AV chat.
Is this a niche market? Maybe so, maybe no! The social experiments of sharing live video are in their infancy, but seem to be well-received. Who can say what effect h.264's improved quality, performance and lower bandwidth will have?
It would be something if we could access the AV of choice, on the device(s) of choice at the time and place of our choosing.
Is it "King Content" or
King Content-delivery?