Rumors regarding the details of Apple’s upcoming Apple TV platform have emerged via “trusted sources” cited by NewTeeVee, claiming that the company is planning a new, $99 set-top box that would use iPhone OS and cloud-based storage. In fact, the new Apple TV sounds a lot like a headless-iPhone: it’s described as having minimal ports, basically just power and a 1080p HD video output, as well as using the same 1GHz Apple 14 CPU and 16GB of onboard storage. Those users wanting to host media files locally will apparently be able to use an Apple Time Capsule to do so, but Apple is supposedly pushing for streaming content. That will be via a hosted service not dissimilar to Amazon’s streaming system. While it will run iPhone OS, like the iPhone HD and iPad, it’s not yet known whether Apple will be enabling App Store access, or indeed how it would handle scaling software available through the store to an HDTV set. Apple is currently trying to get TV programmers to drop the price on rentals, with mostly everything else remaining the same. Once purchased, consumers have 30 days to watch the video with rentals then expiring 24 hours after you start. The rumor says that Apple wants to offer streamed episodes, a major but overdue change for iTunes, for a reduced price of $0.99 per episode. Those rentals would follow the same rules as movie rentals on iTunes already do: Rent an episode, and you have 30 days to begin watching it, after which you have 24 hours to finish it.
Just a few year’s back, Apple’s iTunes allowed people to download TV shows on a pay-per-episode model, and while the introduction of Apple TV hasn’t done quite as well as the iPad launch, Apple is still very focused on that product line in the hopes that people will want a hybrid TV platform that enables them to watch their regularly scheduled programming while also being able to watch YouTube and other online video properties from the comfort of their couch. Right now, iTunes sells individual TV episodes for either $1.99 (standard-def) or $2.99 (high-def), and those episodes are downloaded, rather than streamed. Downloading episodes takes both time and storage space, especially for HD content–one 44-minute episode in HD (hour-long dramas, for example) can total over 1GB in storage space. Those episodes can be watched on a mobile device, computer, or TV–provided your mobile device, computer, or TV set-top box is made by Apple.
AppleTV Platform
Anyone who is not acquainted with the subject, Apple TV wirelessly streams audio, video, and photos from the iTunes libraries of up to six computers—five shared, plus a “host” PC or Mac—or plays files directly from the device’s 160GB hard drive. Throw in the content from the iTunes Store, YouTube, Internet radio, and access to friend’s photo libraries from Flickr and MobileMe and suddenly you have a pretty capable and diverse media extender. And given the success of Apple’s near-100,000-title App Store, one wonders how long it will be until apps are added to the Apple TV’s arsenal.
Apple executives have called its TV product a hobby, suggesting that the device has not been a breakthrough hit. The company has had difficulty in tackling the set-top box market which is fiercely competitive with companies such as Roku and Boxee offering similar set-top boxes and cable companies and satellite companies offering subsidized set-top boxes, but this time the Apple TV may even come with the iOS 4 Software Update, introduced with the iPhone 4. This would allow users to download and install apps directly onto the Apple TV, including third party catch-up TV services and games.
“I suspect it’s only a matter of time before this hobby gets turned into a business, the TV space is too important to ignore,” Michael Gartenberg, a partner with the consulting firm Altimeter Group told the newspaper. “The TV remains one of the last disconnected devices in the household and everyone is trying to figure it out.”
What is more surprising is that rumors also suggests the new hardware, which will run on the same A4 chip as the iPad, and be full HDTV compatible, will have a mere 16GB of Flash storage aboard. The rest of the content storage will be in the cloud, and will come streamed over the Intertubes to your home’s big screen. This implies that all those rumors of a revamp of iTunes to take it into the cloud are true, since it’s hard to imagine Apple doing anything other than syncing their newest toy to their successful media hub software. But this has spin-off implications for music and movie streaming to your iPad and iPhone too.
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