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Comment by dave1619 | Hacker News Reader

Gruber's article makes a lot of sense. TV content providers are already creating iOS apps, so why not pull them altogether into a Newstand-like app folder called iTV. And that would appear on your Apple TV as well.

Apple could also differentiate from Free TV "Channel" apps and Paid ones in the Appstore. Free channels apps would monetize through commercials. The paid ones would be subscription like HBO, etc. The TV channels could monetize even better because there's a direct relationship with the customer/viewer and they can target ads more specifically (location, demographic, age, gender, interests, etc).

In the end, Apple's new TV will be just a screen giving the user access to "channels" which will be apps.

Also, the apps might have two interfaces: one for iPad/iPhone (or separate) and also one for the iTV. The iTV interface will be really simple and will list out all your TV apps and what's playing or what's popular recently.

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You could spin this further. Me thinks SJ might have been wrong with his analogy of "trucks" and PCs. Perhaps instead, TVs will become the center of processing power and memory/state in the home, with tablets/phones, in combination with an external keyboard, accessing the power like terminals used to in the 70s, except the mainframe is now in your living room instead of n km away. That would also require a unified OS so it's not one or two generations away. Still, this could be something to think about...

I don't think so. First iTunes was your digital hub, now it's iCloud.

No, Microsoft tried to push things this way with their home media server in the early 00s, but it is too complicated for normal people (non hackers) to administrate. So everything is going to the cloud.

Your solution would be great if bandwidth didn't exponentially increase each year.

The fact that Microsoft's solution failed is not a valid reason to assume Apple's won't.

I heard rumors about some tablet PC Apple was supposed to make, called the iSlate. Too bad nothing ever came of that.

Where in the US is bandwidth increasing exponentially each year? Can you name even a single residential neighborhood in the US that has had significant increases in available broadband speed in two consecutive years? FTTN/FTTH services are still pretty rare, and basically nobody has the choice between multiple such services. If you've got a choice between DOCSIS 3 and VDSL, you're in a very special market.

(And it should go without saying that cellular ISPs aren't an option for a multi-user household.)

Nielsen's law: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980405.html

Also found this on Wikipedia (not saying it's exponential here but still supports my point):

>In 1998, all of the United States backbone networks had utilized the slowest data rate of 45 Mbit/s. However the changing technologies allowed for 41 percent of backbones to have data rates of 2,488 Mbit/s or faster by the mid 2000's.

Nielsen's law is basically saying that the highest available bandwidth anywhere increases exponentially. That doesn't mean that any one customer gets an exponential increase, or that the majority of customers get any increase at all. And backbone capacity increases don't help unless they significantly outpace the growth in the number of subscribers.

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