Steve Jobs has a standing engagement with every diehard Mac geek in existence for the second week of January each year. It's one of a handful of dates in which he unveils Apple's new products and strategies. In the past few months, much of the attention has been focused on two areas: the gameplan for Intel-based Macs, and the iPod. The impact of the latter to readers of this blog is hardly worth explaining. But the new Macs may have a lot more to do with podcasting than you think.

The iTunes Music Store continues to tease us with a glimmer of what could be. To Apple's credit, iTunes has singlehandedly jawboned media companies into producing downloadable versions of their products. At the moment, iTMS boasts video content from Disney (ABC/ESPN) and Universal (NBC/USA/SciFi), including shows that are no longer on the air. What they haven't done is provide a subscription model for those shows. If Apple could promise me a season of, say, Arrested Development, delivered straight to my 5G iPod, I'd put my money down in advance. (Well, except for the part where my TiVo already fulfills that same promise.)

In fact, if iTunes had all of the shows I watch regularly, and offered a reasonable subscription price for them, I think the only thing that would hold me back from breaking it off with the cable company would be live news and events. I've already used my iPod with my home TV (not to mention the projector at work) to catch up on my shows -- as well as my vid/vod/videocasts -- whenever the mood strikes. It's a natural fit, when you really think about it:

iPods are cool.

TiVo is cool.

Therefore, an iPod that's as good as a TiVo is wicked cool.

I'll couch a 2006 prediction in here: Apple is going to try like hell to prove to the public that a video-capable iPod is not a gimmick. That means interface improvements, larger drives, higher-quality video, and my guess is a video-capable iPod nano this year. But above all else will be an emphasis on everything working with and/or through the iPod and iTunes.

Which brings us to the new Macs. The rumored Mac mini is a home theater PC: an arena Microsoft has tried in vain for years to conquer. The Front Row app that came with the last batch of iMacs was a warmup for an intuitive TV-based media interface, and the Intel chipset offers instant-on functionality, a must-have for home theater components. There's even the suggestion that the new Mac will have an iPod dock built-in.

All indications are that Apple wants to use the iPod as a Trojan horse with which to take over the home media market. (Hmm. Trojans. That reminds me: if you're in the US and didn't see that USC-Texas game, you can and must buy the highlights on iTunes.) While Bill Gates is crossing his fingers over Xbox 360 and Windows Vista, Jobs may already be moving into his endgame.

I had been figuring it would be somewhere into the next decade at the earliest before the broadcast date of a show became simply a transmission date -- the point at which the embargo on a given episode expires, and it is made available to the public. I think that if Apple keeps moving down this path, it might happen as early as next year.

The avenues that would open to the viewer are amazing to ponder, though I'm sure that network execs get white-knuckled at the very thought of that kind of change. For the first time perhaps since the advent of television, entrenched organizations at every step of the media production chain are at risk of being shaken to their core thanks to a wave of new technology.

It's no exaggeration to state that some corporations are entering 2006 wondering whether they'll still be around in 2010. And from where I sit, for the companies I'm thinking about, it's about goddamn time. Many media companies, particularly content owners, have played defense for far too long. If they didn't see the Internet and portable media coming, economic theory says they deserve what they're gonna get. To boil it down to a few words, Schumpeter's principle of creative destruction is going to make your TV kick ass.