“Apple did throw down the gauntlet with iTV, a device that will plug into your tube, then wirelessly stream media from your home Mac or PC. A lot of techies have been working a long time to try to make this work well, and even Apple doesn’t have it right yet, since it’s not appearing until the beginning of 2007. Here’s who’s got the biggest potential to lose when iTV hits the street,” Seth Jayson writes for The Motley Fool.
Jayson writes, “The small fry who already make devices that do the same thing — and there are some — stand to lose in a big way. You can bet Apple’s version will be slick, clean, and resonate well with the iFaithful. For a company like Pegasus Wireless, which has been hyping its wireless video-transmission devices, this may be the final blow to a still-overinflated stock. And if the reported compatibility with PCs is true (hey Apple, do us all a favor and make it run Windows Media files, will ya?), even nonMacs like me will be tempted to pick one up.”
MacDailyNews Note: Don’t hold your breath on that one, Seth.
Jayson continues, “Hewlett-Packard stands to lose big in a couple of ways. The first is with ‘media PCs.’ Simply put, no one has made these workable yet… I give Apple credit for realizing that trying to jam a PC into our home theaters is probably a lost battle — at least for now — and taking the simpler route to link the office box to the family-room entertainment center.”
“But HP also stands to lose on an interesting product few know anything about: It’s been hawking a Wi-Fi-capable, media-crunching, 37-inch LCD “Mediasmart” TV for quite a while. The trouble for HP here is twofold. First, no one’s heard of this thing. (I only came across it in Mark Cuban’s weblog.) The next is that it costs more than the price of iTV plus a 37-inch widescreen. And, of course, folks who already have the big old widescreen won’t need to buy a whole new unit. Thanks to Apple, we’ll be able to just buy the gadget that interacts with the screen,” Jayson writes.
Full article in which Jayson begs Microsoft to fix Xbox 360’s media streaming so he can forgo the iTV here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “DLMeyer” for the heads up.]
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