Apple TV is going to change everything - sooner or later.
For the moment Apple TV is just a $99 set-top box that lets you access content from the Internet or your home Mac or PC.
It's a nice product, but it's not revolutionary.
But for Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) to get anywhere close to that level, Apple TV will need features that radically improve, if not completely change, how people watch television.
One thing we know for certain is that late CEO Steve Jobs thought the television industry is "broken" and that he had a vision for revamping television as he had done with music and mobile phones.
"I'd like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use," Jobs famously told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. "It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it."
The main reason we don't have a Steve Jobs-like Apple TV now is that the players in the television industry are wary of Apple, having witnessed how the tech giant sucked the lion's share of profits from the other industries it disrupted.
The delay has given Apple's rivals a head start. Both Microsoft Corp.'s (Nasdaq: MSFT) Xbox 360 as well as Google Inc.'s (Nasdaq: GOOG) Google TV already do some of what Jobs envisioned.
But neither of those companies is likely to bring a solution to market as elegant and unified as Apple's.
Based on news tidbits and patent filings, we actually have some pretty good clues about what Apple could do with Apple TV.
While a future Apple TV (or iTV) may not include all of these ideas, it will have to include at least some of them if it is to make any significant impact. Exactly what Apple will release, however, remains a mystery.
Even Apple CEO Tim Cook doesn't seem quite sure what might evolve from this "hobby."
"This is an area of intense interest for us," Cook said at the All Things Digital Conference in May. "We're going to keep pulling this string and see where it takes us."
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