Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Free, Live Streaming Music and Video on Your iPhone — From Apple

There are more than 425,000 apps in Apple’s iTunes store, but it’s always worth paying attention to the ones that Apple produces itself.

Here’s the latest: “iTunes Festival London 2011,” a free app that will stream live footage from an Apple-branded concert series throughout July.

The app will work on both iPhones and iPads, and includes AirPlay support so you can get the shows up on your plasma, via Apple TV.

This looks like a pretty cool lineup (Coldplay! Bruno Mars! The Arctic Monkeys! And, um, Gwyneth Paltrow!), so it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t want to at least play around with the app on a slow summer day. Concert giant Live Nation handles the actual producing duties for the shows, and will stream them via its app, too.

Wired.com’s John Abell thinks this app could be the precursor to a long-running series of live events streamed by Apple. Who knows? Could be. My hunch is that Apple is putting the app out as a glorified demo and will be happy to let other companies carry the ball forward from here.

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I’m a giant vat of creative juices.

— David Pogue on why he’s joining Yahoo