A new patent application by Apple reveals that Apple has been working on the ability for iPhone and iPod touch owners to wirelessly stream content from their at home iTunes library for use on the road.

iPhone or iPod touch owners must selectively sync content from their Mac or PC’s iTunes library. This transfers those items to the mobile device for later playback. Apple is proposing that mobile device owners could instead access their entire collection over Wi-Fi or cellular networks:

New versions iTunes and the iPhone Software could theoretically eliminate this problem by syncing only the metadata—or tiny files containing the barebones attributes of each media item or playlist but not the content itself—from a user’s iTunes library to their portable devices.

This is all done by using metadata. Appleinsider reports: “Using this metadata, iPhones and iPods would contain “virtual media items” representing every playlist, video, photo, and mobile game stored on their computer, even if the sum of those files would ordinarily be too large to fit onto the devices’ hard disk drive or flash drive. This is possible because metadata capable of representing a media item consumes only faction—typically less than 1 percent—of the space required to store the media item itself.

This is all interesting, but as with all patents, it is only an idea that won’t may see the light of day. This idea sure would free up space on my iPhone though