Apple may offer streaming video "downloads"
Loose-lips Friday continues with word from that pesky ThinkSecret source (whom we're sure Steve Jobs would love to tar and feather) that Apple will be rolling out a significant upgrade to its current video-download service when and if it announces a new Mac mini at January's Macworld Expo. The revamped system, which is rumored to already have content lined-up from NBC, CBS, and Paramount, will supposedly store a customer's purchases on their .mac account's iDisk and stream the content on demand via Front Row 2.0. Apple will apparently be using a caching system that they've patented to take advantage of broadband connections for maximizing video quality and smoothness, and will supposedly allow direct-to-iPod transfers through the service. Still unknown at this point is, of course, the actual content that would be available, along with questions about potential Windows (or even non-Mac mini, for that matter) support, and uncertainty concerning the scope of the supposed iDisk implementation.
[Thanks, Dave]
