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iTunes and Podcasts and Videos

This article from Wired talks about the effect the new iTunes podcast directory has affected podcasters.

Overall, I think iTunes having a podcast directory is a great thing for podcasts. It's brought exposure to a ton of podcasts and brought the entire podcasting phenomenon to the masses. It's had a pretty big effect on my podcast.

For the podcast producers though, it's been frustrating to make sure their RSS feeds work well in iTunes. I know it's been hard for us. iTunes has added several new, non-standard tags in RSS feeds. I'd say reaction around the web has been less-than-positive to these new tags.

They didn't give out a whole lot of documentation about the new tags, so people like MAKE have been making tutorials of their own on how to add these enhanced features to podcasts. Apple has started to really make these new tags work (why they didn't work at the launch, I'm not sure).

Our image tag is finally showing in iTunes though some other features still aren't. I'm sure they'll figure out soon enough, but why these things didn't work at the launch boggles my mind.

Now comes word that Apple may sell music videos in the iTMS. I'm all about buying a song for $0.99, but there's no way I'm going to pay $1.99 for a music video. Ever. Music videos are basically ads for CD's, and I'm not paying for them. I can watch them on MTV, MTV2 err MTV-Hits.

Steve, I want movies in iTunes. I want them cheap and in HD and if they expire say in 48 hours, I'm okay with that too. If you make it awesome, I'll even cancel my NetFlix account and get my movies from you. Make it happen.