The company is building a 500,000 square-foot data center in North Carolina, which will provide the enormous bandwidth required for wide-spread streaming video. Also, look for bitten fruit company to reboot iTunes into a streaming service – using the same infrastructure as would streaming video.

So previously the company forbade iPhone applications with live video-streaming capability, securing the functionality as a private API. Now you can go to the Apple Store and download Ustream and Knocking Live Video.

What is the muse behind Apple’s sudden video charge?

You’ve got to give it to the folks at YouTube and Flip for making personal media more deliverable and accessible – so it is only logical that Steve Jobs is yelling: “Ok ok! We’re in! We’ll play!”

James McQuivey, a Forrester analyst who focuses on consumer video had this to say:

“I would look at it and say, ‘You’re Apple. You can’t just refresh your existing line. What’s your game changer?…it’s getting into personal broadcasting, which is essentially what this is.”

John Ham, co-founder of Ustream said this:

“People always have a cellphone on them…You can’t always predict life, and there are going to be moments where you want to share…. We’ve seen people take out devices and streaming earthquakes or planes landing, and now there are going to be all sorts of citizen journalism events now if we have millions with this application over iPhone.”