"Where is your iTunes?"

This past December the guys at Toshiba asked us a very simple question, "Where is your iTunes?" The heart of the issue revolves around content. How are we going to provide our future customers with Music, Videos, Podcasts and other digital content for our upcoming devices?

Our initial solution is to find really simple and innovative ways for you to access all the free multimedia that's online. For example, it would be awesome to pull-in and watch YouTube videos through our devices--or access online podcasts from Odeo. Since it isn't possible to launch with our own music store, our intention is to allow our devices to play a wide range of audio codecs out-of-the-box. Rhapsody and Napster are two services that can supply music in the interim, and you always have the ability to rip tracks from your CDs and put them on our devices.

Toshiba has a great point. And the truth is that we're not going to be able to make content deals with any of the major media companies before we launch. I think once people see our devices we'll have a lot of companies interested in providing content, but we have yet to fully unveil our designs. I also think we're going to need to have our devices on the market for at least a quarter before we can start working on any major content distribution deals.

In the mean time lets work on innovating how you can access all the great multimedia that's online for free. We'd like to make it is as simple as selecting topics through our interface and then displaying all the latest content that's available in those areas--with scripting and APIs running in the background that pull-in/convert and make everything viewable and compatible with our devices. We realize a lot of this is difficult to picture or understand, but we promise as we move forward we'll be able to give you better details on how accessing and managing multimedia on our devices will work.