Steve Jobs showed some new iChat capabilities during his keynote at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference yesterday. Delivery expected late Q3-2007.

Higher audio quality. iChat will use Fraunhofer IIS's AAC-Low Delay Codec. Cisco adopted AAC-LD for TelePresence, its highest end video product. 

Recording. Audio as AAC, video as MPEG-4. Podcast heaven.

Multiple active accounts per user while logged in. A little bit of Trillian for .Mac, AIM, and Jabber accounts.  

Interop with AOL's AIM. Works with text, audio or video chat. Presence. Both iChat and AIM users in one chat. AIM users can be on PCs. No word on file transfer.

Video Backdrops. Drag your presentation, slide show or movies into a live video call. Blow up the video to full screen. Then put your slides/movies in the background.

Video Effects. Apply transparency to yourself, flip the video, etc. Applied live. From the Photo Booth app.

One window holds multiple open chats in tabs. Addresses the screen clutter of many open chat windows.  

iChat Theater lets you pour multiple sources into your chat. Combine your webcam, photos, presentation slides, audios, and videos in a call. Share with both iChat and AIM users. Show your "virtual presentation room" at full screen. A little bit of Slingbox via VoIM.

iChat Theater API. Push application content through iChat Theater into a video chat session. Here's how.

TBD: Screen Sharing. See and control a desktop, audio on top, two people only. Not mentioned during the keynote but previewed earlier.

SMS forwarding. Hmmm. What's this? No other discussion of PSTN connectivity.