– iTunes University: Courses from higher education institutions (including Stanford, MIT, and Yale) offering thousands of hours of classroom lectures.
– Hundreds of TV programs including documentaries, current and past TV shows from networks including ABC, CBS, NBC.
– Video rentals of past and current Hollywood hit movies.

I’m happy about this because it means more traffic for audio and video podcasters. It used to be that in order to search for podcasts in iTunes you had to go to power search. Now podcasts are accessed by searching the main search field in the upper right. For example, I’m in charge of the podcast for San Francisco Opera. It used to be that you would enter in the search term and only albums and song selections would come up (music that was previously issued on CD). Now, the audio and video podcasts come up right next to the songs and albums and this means more traffic and more downloads for the podcasts.

Business content is now more accessible as search terms such as “best practices” now get the maximum 150 hits with results from iTunes University and podcasts covering best practices for accounting, education, supply chain, marketing, and so on. When I first started in this business, I spent my time explaining what podcasting is and wondering if it would ever take off. Now, I’m happy that it has.

I’m really happy about iTunes University. It means that anybody with an internet connection can learn from our top institutions. Technology is leveling the playing field. I’m really happy about video rentals. I downloaded and watched movies on vacation in my hotel room (versus the high rates they charge) and on the airplane – longer battery life and it beats carrying DVDs. I’m really happy about the TV programs as I like to learn from niche documentaries along my interests. With iTunes I can watch old reruns of the Dukes of Hazzard that I enjoyed as a kid. This weekend I discovered lots of shows I used to watch and hadn’t seen since I was a kid. We live in a time of niche consumption where the long tail long tail is becoming the standard. Finally, I’m really happy about the quality advances in these media via high definition which I enjoy via the recently improved AppleTV.

I don’t think we’ll be able to download a Blu-ray quality program in the next two years. I love watching documentaries and I can find a lot of history and science shows through iTunes. It takes about 10 minutes to download a 40 minute show and size is about 500 MB. It costs $2 and it has no commercials, so the 40 minutes used to take an hour to watch. I figure I’m buying my time back. If $2 saves 20 minutes then I can get my time back at a rate of $6 per hour – a bargain.

I just spent the last two days listening to about 250 B2B podcasts and I’m very happy to see the quality of the content is now much improved from last year.  This year it seems like there were two waves of innovation.  One wave of new podcasts started in February of this year (2006) and many of those only lasted for a few months, but then again in June a lot of new podcasts started and they are still publishing.

In order to do my survey of podcasts, I used podfeed.net because it is a lot easier to quickly get to new content and listen for a few minutes rather than the minute or whatever that iTunes gives you.  Also, iTunes has organized and formatted display of a lot of their better content but made it harder to find the less popular podcasts.  That’s good for the general public because it needed to be cleaned up, but bad for me in my exercise.