[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s I listened to John Gruber and Dan Benjamin's The Talk Show podcast on my iPhone this morning, I was struck by an idea. What if Apple were to use iCloud to sync the playback times of all your iTunes media? I'm not just talking about podcasts here -- I'm talking about everything from music to videos. Just imagine being able to pick up one of your other Apple devices and start playing something where you left off without needing to sync it with iTunes first -- this would be great.
The idea sounds great on digital paper, but how would it actually work? Let me explain.
Apple could begin by automatically syncing the progress of anything you've been playing with iCloud, either once the media is paused or as it's playing. I'm not sure how much bandwidth it'd take to sync it as you're playing it, but if they did this then I'm sure they'd add an option to automatically sync once the media is paused instead for the users that can't afford to slow down their connection constantly. (I'm sure it doesn't use that much bandwidth since Rdio does almost the exact same thing and it works great.)
Once everything is completely in sync, all it has to do is sync things when they change, which shouldn't take too much time if you have a decent Internet connection. When that's finished, all you'd have to do is pick up your iPhone or iPad and continue listening where you left off; this can be done the other way around as well, from Mac or PC to the iOS device.
This whole idea is actually very similar to what Rdio does with their Web and Mac apps, but with iTunes' music, films, TV shows, and other stuff. It would also be nice if it worked with playlists so you'd be able to pick up right where you left off; even shuffle could be turned on if it were on one device. I think everything could be unified beautifully this way and I'm sure Apple has it in the plans somewhere. What do you think? Let me know on Twitter.