A couple of months ago, I wrote about what I thought the next revision of Apple TV should be like. For some reason, 3 links related to Apple TV showed up in my NetNewsWire today, so rather than doing the link blog, I thought that I'd round them up here:
Apple TV: Time to Get Serious - Arik Hesseldahl over at BusinessWeek comes to the same conclusion that I did -- Apple TV needs an application store.
How Apple TV can score at the big 3.0 - Daniel Eran Dilger over at Roughly Drafted gives a nice rundown of all of the lame ideas floating around, and then a list of some good ideas. The best stuff is after adding an API, we could see a lot of applications that work in conjunction with the iPhone -- using the iPhone to control an application running an Apple TV. There are a lot of cool applications that you could build with such a setup (think: games).
Hulu who? Online video's new model - The Economist covers the rise of Hulu. The key point is that video is much different than music -- it makes tremendous sense to own music, but most videos are viewed only once. This is why the iTunes store has been such a hit for music, but much less of a hit for video.
My take on all of this is that the content on sites like Hulu, ABC.com, tv.com, vimeo, qik, etc. is becoming too great to ignore, and that Apple is going to have to go with some sort of streaming / ad supported option for Apple TV if they really want to compete.
That being said, I don't think that we're going to see any major updates to Apple TV soon. My guess is that the majority of Apple's non-iPhone software engineering resources are currently tied up trying to get Snow Leopard out the door, which I don't expect until June. Assuming that the re-write of Quicktime (called "Quicktime X") adds support for the Nvidia hardware h.264 decoding, then we could see some sort of Apple TV based upon the Nvidia Ion platform, running a modified Snow Leopard as the OS (remember that the current Apple TV is still running a modified version of Tiger). But in order to get all of this done, and come up with some sort of API or app store, I think that we're looking at either late 2009, or early 2010 for a revamped Apple TV.
Maybe if Apple really does appear at CES, Apple TV 3.0 is what they'll be there to pitch?
-Andy.