“The addition of video cameras to Apple’s latest iPhone and iPod Nano were just the first hints of the company’s new personal-media strategy. The company is also building a 500,000 square-foot data center in North Carolina, which could provide the massive bandwidth required for ubiquitous streaming video,” Chen reports. “And Apple’s recent acquisition of Lala suggests it’s interested in rebooting iTunes into a streaming service, according to Wall Street Journal. That means music, in Lala’s case, but the same infrastructure could be shared with streaming video.”
MacDailyNews Take: Or Apple just bought Lala to screw Google. 
Chen continues, “The final piece of the puzzle was Apple’s approval this week of iPhone apps with live video-streaming capability… All these recent developments point to a significant new strategic market for Apple: personal broadcasting, or sharing personal experiences. YouTube and Flip are already big players in this young space, and the logical competitive move for Apple is to make personal media deliverable and accessible anytime, anywhere.”
“That means in the next few years, we’re likely to see video cameras with live-streaming software built into future iPods and iPhones (and the rumored touchscreen tablet, if it ever exists),” Chen writes. “These features will likely be integrated into iTunes, which Apple would convert into a social experience with real-time sharing services, in addition to being a storage tool.”
Chen reports, “In a September iPod event, Jobs made it clear Apple was entering the consumer video market. ‘We want to get in on this,’ Jobs said when he presented the video-equipped iPod Nano’s main competitor: the Flip camcorder. Building a data center, putting a video camera on the iPhone and approving iPhone apps with live video-streaming functionality are all precursor steps necessary for Apple to build for an always-connected, share-everything future.”
Read more in the full article here.
I like his articles. They round things up quite nicely. Whether or not Chen is right we’ll have to see. A good rumour does not a fact make.
Some of this has already been admitted by Apple. Of course we are missing a video camera on the touch, the nano has a camera but no wifi.
The data center has to be for more than just selling more music on iTunes since Apple can already do that without the datacenter.
This certainly makes sense and fits with what we’ve seen the company already do and with what they say.
I was playing around with the new UStream app and it is amazing. This is defenitely the future and the direction apple is headed.
iTunes needs to be fragmented. There’s too much happening in one App…
“Apple just bought Lala to screw Google.”
lucky Google….adios, Kevin
what amazes me about Apple is how far out they plan. Watching all the pieces fall into place is the real fun. For their competitors watching them try to copy where apple has been rather than where they are going is fun too.
Yay! More live amateur porn!
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——RM
Sh**t, no more excuses to get out of the office to out of town meetings any more soon.
Except for the retards who spend all their time playing games and watching videos, what people want is to always be connected to the internet—period.
Brian X Chen…. = Robert X Cringely, outsourced?
iPhone to iPhone video chat, anyone?
Alansky
Games and video have been going through the Internet for over a decade now. Where have you been?
Apple is aiming at facebook and social networking. Me.com is a great domain name. So why not give it the ability to stream your own content to yourself or people you want?
I think apple should by something like wordpress and incorporate into me.com…..then we can get rid of facebook and myspace
The porn possibilities are endless!
Don’t imitate, innovate.
@twilightmoon:
Perhaps I didn’t express myself clearly. What I meant was: The primary value of always being connected to the internet is NOT to play games and watch movies! Only idiots think of the internet solely as a mindless entertainment device.