Apple patent: Stream iTunes to your iPod?

This has the potential to be much more interesting than your speculations. At the minimum its a step towards taking the iTunes sharing model (which I've enjoyed when laptopping at coffeeshops) and stretching it to the portables (and in a way that the Zune failed to do).

Imagine being at a record store and wirelessly accessing a media server "listening station" to hear any track in the shop or watch trailers for any dvds. Imagine being at a museum and being able to get supplementary audio/video related to any exhibit. This could extend to conferences, events, or retail experiences. A media filling station at the airport. You could design a clever LARP game around this stuff.

What if this patent is just showing how the iPhone or the 6th gen iPod can remotely get songs from your iTunes library?

Or it's just the next iPhone app.

That would be a very, very expensive remote control. Might as well get a Sonos at that point.

(They're actually quite spiffy -- www.sonos.com -- check it out. I lust for one.)

This patent isn't about streaming music to the iPod or iPhone. It's about using the iPod or iPhone to control the stream of music from iTunes to a playback device.

A quick look at the patent diagram makes this obvious. The portable device is only sending and receiving meta data, to control the streaming server. Not to actually pull music from it.

Patent, not product. Patent, not product. Sheesh!

I think it would be great to have an orb type solution from apple.

They reference iTunes in the actual patent, which is why I said that it would interact with iTunes. And from the way they described it they made it sounds like it is going to essentially turn your iPod into a remote control for iTunes, with the ability to download media onto your iPod. So I'm not sure if you'll actually be able to stream it, but I wouldn't put that past Apple.

my PSP does this and a lot more, for example look into Sony's locationfree player

I was actually surprised the iPhone didn't have iTunes in it with all of its internet capabilities. Maybe they ran out of time or might be putting it in the next version. Who knows, iTunes would be cool on the iPhone tho.

mntdev.com