Connected iPods

Some Apple rumour-mongering:
In this report from Piper Jaffray, they talk about the future of connected iPods. It is the usual waffle in many ways. Basically restating stuff that is obvious to anyone with more than 2 braincells.

However, there is one point that got me thinking. Streaming audio to an iPod touch. There are hacks out there today that do this and Apple making this somehow standard makes a lot of sense.

But here's the clever bit. Several recent Apple technologies could have a direct role to play here.

Back To My Mac is the most obvious one. While this is currently set up to allow screen and file-sharing with Mac in your home network, it could easily be retasked to provide access to music library sharing (as already present in iTunes) with devices outside the home network. Pretty sweet.

However, this thing would require your computer to be on at all times in order to stream the music. Annoying.

Enter Time Capsule. Sure it is meant as a way of doing backups. For now. It would be dead trivial however to build in music library sharing here too. Then you make Time Capsule a "Back To My Mac" aware device and bingo. Depending on speed this might work for movies as well. Plus any other files hosted by Time Capsule could be made available to these iPods too.

This last item might even be a way for Apple to introduce file-format compatibility. Nowadays many services convert Office documents and the like to Flash or PDF for easy viewing. The conversion, especially on an underpowered devices, might take a long time. In this case, Time Capsule could do this in the background and have the file ready in readable format by the time you head out.