I would have blogged this sooner, but was having The Day From Hellâ„¢ - regardless, this is pretty cool stuff. Apple has opened up the iTunes media warehouse for any campus to share audio and video via the iTMS interface. This will allow any campus to replicate something like the Stanford iTunes Experience relatively easily, with the possibility to hook into things like lecturecasting, alumni communication, community outreach, etc...
I'm going to be cheerleading and doing whatever I can to get the University of Calgary to take them up on this.
There are some issues, like the perceived lock-in to the iPod, and the need to have iTunes on the desktop. Both aspects have some very strong arguments both for and against, which I'm not going to rehash now (but am giving them a lot of thought, and Brian's given it a go already).
One thing I'd like to know is how to integrate the iTMS as a part of a larger ecosystem - it can't be an exclusive engagement, so there would be nothing preventing a campus from also producing .mp3 versions of appropriate files and hosting them in a non-iTMS solution for the non-iTunes-using, non-iPod-toting, or Linux-using crowds.