Briefly: no special event this week, iTunes video-casting support

It's no longer expected that Apple on Thursday will host a special event to introduce new music-related products. Sources now report that media alerts sent from Apple to several French publications were slightly misleading and misinterpreted.

In a message to the publications last month, the company asked that some time be reserved on July 7th when new products would be presented to them. Similar messages sent to the publications in prior months had resulted in media events that delivered Apple related goods.

Instead, sources say either Apple France or Apple Europe on Thursday will brief some media outlets on the latest iPod-related products. According to our checks, these products are existing Apple and third-party iPod accessories.

Existing video-casting support in iTunes

The RSS technology implementation in iTunes 4.9 will syndicate almost any valid RSS feed, regardless of what filetypes it links. Couple this with support for video playback, also recently added to itunes, and its easy to see that iPod Podcasting support easily translates into iTunes Video-casting support.

One tipster has setup a standard RSS feed linked to video files of type .mov and .mp4. Users of iTunes 4.9 can subscribe to this feed as a Podcast. It loads just fine. Instead of streaming pre-recorded audio content to the user, each entry in the Postcasts launches pre-recorded video content from within iTunes in popup windows.

Could this be yet another reason for Apple to develop a video iPod and continue to push the envelop in terms of storage capacities? Last summer Apple through job listings sought a new member for its iPod engineering team who had experience in "video integration."

Several Wall Street analysts have also vouched their belief that Apple will debut an iPod with video capabilities just prior to this year's holiday buying season. One analyst also hinted that the recently added iTunes video support could serve as a precursor to an iTunes Video store.