JMS

Last week I went to a meeting about Apple’s new “iTunes U” initiative. iTunes U got started about a year ago and now seems to be gaining more momentum and a bigger presence in iTunes overall. The basic idea is to create a platform for colleges, universities and selected other “beyond campus” providers of educational content to offer lectures, presentations, classes and other content for free download by students and/or the public at large.

It’s a free service and I’m sure it’s a compelling one for many universities. We may experiment with it for PRX as well. iTunes does all the hosting and helps you with the setup and, of course, puts you on a platform that now has 500 million potential users. The list of participants is getting longer and includes Stanford, MIT, Duke, Carnegie Mellon and a few dozen more. The “beyond campus” providers include American Public Media, MoMA, New York Public Library, and PBS.

Between iTunes U and the iTunes podcasting directory, which offers something like 120,000 podcasts, there is a ton of free content available. It’s clear that Apple likes the idea of recruiting more high-quality free non-music content to offer to users (who presumably will want to fill new iPods, iPhones and laptops with it all), and no doubt it’s a boon to lifelong learners and media seekers worldwide.

It’s interesting to see some crossover items in both categories, such as a radio documentary I found for sale in the Audiobooks section ($7.95 for 52 minutes) and for free in iTunes U. You’d have to be a discriminating searcher to figure that out, however, and it’s entirely likely that these sections are serving distinct if overlapping subsets of the iTunes audience.

But now that iTunes is the world’s biggest music retailer and generates billions of dollars of revenue for Apple and the content providers to the music store, what about enabling a la carte, subscription or volunteer payments for the long tail in podcasts and the educational content in iTunes U?

I’m intrigued by the voluntary model and certainly it’s one that public media needs to redefine as it moves to digital platforms (keep an eye on Project VRM as it continues to spell out the solutions and implications of more user-centric approaches). Right now I have $9.06 in my iTunes account left over from a gift card, and after enjoying a 90-minute video lecture from MIT I might be quite willing to ding it over to them, especially if they reminded me with a short and sweet appeal before/during or after the talk and on the site. I think a decent percentage of the 500 million iTunes users out there might respond similarly.

One can imagine lots of reasons why Apple hasn’t and probably won’t enable this in iTunes, but it’s worth pondering and pointing out, particularly as most of the energy and attention goes to ad-supported models for content syndication.