Steve Jobs "hopes" AirPlay will support Safari and third-party apps next year

MacRumors is reporting that one of their readers emailed Steve Jobs to ask if Apple was ever going to enable AirPlay to stream videos from third-party apps or those embedded in a web page in Safari. Jobs answered:

"Yep, hope to add these features to Airplay in 2011."

AirPlay is the technology introduced in iOS 4.2 that enables users to stream content from their iOS devices to televisions connected to an Apple TV. A number of third-party developers have also introduced AirPlay products, like the Photofast AP1000 that allows you to stream music to your car's audio system.

Currently, AirPlay video support is limited to the YouTube, Photos and Video apps that come bundled as part of iOS -- although we've seen several compelling proof-of-concept demos courtesy of our own Erica Sadun, and jailbroken devices already have an option to activate AirPlay for other apps. The addition of an AirPlay API is going to make a lot of developers happy in 2011.