Battlestar Gallactica, Podcasts, and AirTunes

I’m finally seeing how extremely cool AirTunes can be. I’m also beginning to see how cool podcasts can be.  I owe these revelations to Battlestar Galactica’s new podcasts, which feature commentary by Executive Producer Ronald D. Moore. For the most part, I see a good deal of the podcast craze to be a throwback to radio. This podcast, however, is the first that I‘ve seen doing something really cool with the format. They’re making the audio commentary that we all know and love from DVDs and releasing it for free via the internet for watching along with each week’s episode. The podcast starts with the beginning of the show and beeps at each commercial break, so that you can pause the audio and follow nicely along. That’s an innovative and cool use of podcasts, best served with an innovative use of wireless technology: AirTunes.

I grabbed the podcast for last week’s episode manually and listened to it on my iPod after I had watched the show. This week, however, I had already subscribed to the podcast feed in NetNewsWire, so the podcast was already queued up in iTunes.  When I launched iTunes, I noticed the AirTunes drop-down menu, so I streamed the audio to the Airport Express hooked into my receiver, started up the show on my ReplayTV, and hit play in iTunes.  The result was like watching a DVD’s audio commentary.

I’ve never really been too enthralled with AirTunes until now.  I’m hooked. I hope more good TV shows start doing things like this, so I can use AirTunes on a more regular basis.

All I need is an IR blaster for my Powerbook and a script that will somehow send a signal over IR to pause the ReplayTV whenever I have to pause the audio playback in iTunes. Anybody want to whip that up for me?  Thanks.