The Future of TV after AppleTV

Last week Mr. Jobs announce the erstwhile iTV as AppleTV. He then announced iPhone and overshadowed his new product. To me, iPhone is a logical continuation of the iPod and has a better than average chance of succeeding due to the shear size of the global mobile phone market. The AppleTV, however, is a whole new thing and I think it will change TV as we know it.

Cable TV is really the same old thing as TV and radio except it is delivered through a controlled medium so one can be charged for it. We have been conditioned now to accept paying $70-$90 per month (over $800 per year) for content that runs through our fingers like water. With the advent of TiVo you can save some of your content, but you have to have to pay a premium to do it.

But imagine, instead of buying 300 channels of digital cable and all the bandwidth to carry all of that each day imagine all that bandwidth turned into pure internet streaming goodness! And instead of more content in a week than you could watch in a lifetime, you buy only the programs you actually want to watch. That, I belive, is the revolution that AppleTV represents.

With AppleTV and the already strong TV offerings on iTunes, Apple is positioned to radically alter the viewing ecosystem of the world. They have some content; they have a somewhat workable pipeline to the consumers and they now have the hardware/software component to make it happen. While others have been waiting to see if Apple Inc. was going to open up and operate a virtual network for its iPhone, I have been wondering if Apple might not open up a virtual cable operation.

The major remaining obstacle to this vision is that we need to clean out that coaxial superhighway of all the content then get the data off the shoulder of the road and out in the express lane. Someone is eventually going to do this and show the cable companies that it is advantageous to them. Few would have believed in October 2001 that Apple was going to change the world of digital music completely in the next 5 years. My bet is that AppleTV is going to do the same to the cable industry in the next 5 years.