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“Analyst Gene Munster with Piper Jaffray on Monday issued a note to investors in which he reiterated his belief that Apple plans to launch a connected, full-fledged HDTV in the next 2 to 4 years,” Hughes reports. “He acknowledged recent rumors that the existing Apple TV set top box will be renamed iTV, but said that the anticipated product update will only be a stepping stone to the eventual flat panel living room TV.”
Hughes reports, “A key component for the Apple television set, Munster believes, will be Apple’s soon-to-launch data center in North Carolina. He believes the massive location could serve as a hub for a cloud-based iTunes service that would allow users to stream their catalog of movies and TV shows. Munster believes the upcoming Apple TV update will add an App Store, allowing users to download applications to run on the device.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Judge Bork” and “Lava_Head_UK” for the heads up.]
It’s all well and good Apple having a data centre to host and send out all this media from the cloud, but from a user perspective it’s just not going to work. People struggle with bandwidth as it is, if you throw in all the bandwidth required to replace people’s dvd/tv viewing the system just wouldn’t work.
Time for Apple Inc. to rule yet one more industry! Love it!
Time for Apple Inc. to rule yet one more industry! Love it!
Time for Apple Inc. to rule yet one more industry! Love it!
Time for Apple Inc. to rule yet one more industry! Love it!
Time for Apple Inc. to rule yet one more industry! Love it!
Time for Apple Inc. to rule yet one more industry! Love it!
Time for Apple Inc. to rule yet one more industry! Love it!
mmmmmmmm…Sarah Silverman……
Apple: Changing technology for the better.
When will this “story” finally give up and go away?
Yes, M.X.N.T.4.1.is correct, bandwidth is the key. Or LACK of it.
More importantly, HDTVs are commodity items. More so than even computers. Looking at Sony alone, they have dozens of different models with differing sizes and feature sets at different price points.
Apple does NOT enter such markets.
It makes more sense for Apple to design and produce a beefed up TV that can connect with ANY HDTV… YOUR HDTV… and connect to your home network.
Mac mini with TV abilities anyone?
Oh, wait, a Mac mini can do most of it now.
Internet providers will limit usage big time and nip this in the bud.
Apple needs to buy Comcast. Comcast is restricting the pipe to make their own over-the-air choices the only ones you can buy.
Comcast market cap: 50.15B. Pay cash after the 24th or buy a controlling interest and keep the balance in the bank.
@Al: That’s already happening north of the border to block Netflix online. Any cable provider that’s also an ISP sees the threat to their cable business and will do anything to stop it.
Al
It’s happening in suburban Minneapolis with Comcast. Started in July.
W-i-f-f!
IMO Apple are likely to offer 720p streaming for HD.
I don’t think this will win then many customers in the marketing wars when Netflix, Microsoft Zune video, PlayStation, etc are offer 1080p streaming for movies.
Moreover, it’s not a replacement for Blu-ray’s 40Mbsp high quality 1080p — nor is 1080p streaming to be honest with its 5Mbps-ish — but 720p streaming can be better than DVD.
The idea is rather unrealistic, but not for the reasons stated by Mr. Reeeee. Making and selling a HDTV that also had additional functionality and connects to special online services is not fundamentally different than fusing Mac Mini with a monitor into an iMac. 21.5″ monitors are commodity, so the logic would be that it would be not worth it for Apple to sell a monitor with a built-in computer.
I’m sure that if Apple were to build and sell a HDTV (perhaps 42″ or similar), it would sell well, it being the ultimate brand that consumers covet. However, the point remains that any service that relies on heavy usage of bandwidth (average of 3 hours per day) will fail with today’s availability of unlimited broadband. For an image quality even remotely resembling reasonably decent HD, you need at least 4Mbps of sustained throughput. This translates to about 6GB worth of data transfer per average day (for an American household). Let us not forget, not all family members watch TV together (on a single TV set), so with multiple TVs, there may be multiple streams, increasing those average 6GB. I can’t think of ANY broadband internet provider in the US that wouldn’t go broke if majority of their customers were to begin sucking this much data down their pipes on a daily basis.
@ Mr. Reee
“Mac mini with TV abilities anyone?
Oh, wait, a Mac mini can do most of it now.”
Exactly. When I get a chance I’m getting the new mini. Combined with Elgato’s EyeTV, the mini with HDMI out can do way more than Apple will ever do with the TV.
In other words, not even the heaviest torrent downloaders of today don’t suck down almost 200GB of data in any given month, which is what an average American household would do if they were to watch 720p HD streams from Apple’s data centre.
@ Predrag… welcome back. I think I missed your return… how long have you been back?
Oh… but you did miss quite a bit of political discussion while you were gone!!
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Low data rates and ISP restrictions put cloud driven 1080p HDTV in the distant future. If only there was some way to get around these serious infrastucture limitations. Maybe, I don’t know, some sort of physical media that could even be transmitted by snail mail? Maybe it would have the capibility of delivering more than just an artifact laden and highly compressed version of a film. Perhaps it could have room for a high data rate 1080p two hour film in 3D plus extra things like “making of” shorts or maybe even some sort of alternate audio track where the director could tell you about the movie as it’s playing? And you what would be totally awesome? If I could somehow use my Mac to make one of these things. Oh well. Maybe someday!
Apple needs to buy Sprint.
Apple would get their 4G network, and could use Apple’s billions to upgrade the network nationwide and deliver last mile wireless services, both mobile telephony and HDTV to the home.
Apple would have the means to deliver multimedia services to most of the country on its terms.
“Gene Munster…reiterated his belief that Apple plans to launch a connected, full-fledged HDTV in the next 2 to 4 years”
Jesus, Gene: don’t stick your neck out. Why not make it a round “within 5 years”?
And you will never see a TV with the Apple brand on it. Gene: do you not understand what business Apple is in? They do high-end, high-margin. What kind of market is LCD/Plasma TVs? That’s right: the *opposite* of high-end, high-margin. Not only does he hedge his timeline with a ridiculous bracket for technology, he’s not even right.
Gene Munster: fscking clueless about Apple since 1995.