Apple: Of Tablets and TVs

The hype sur­round­ing the tablet is at an all time high: it could be a big­ger iPhone; or not; it could be a new mac­book; or not. But one thing that no one else seems to be think­ing is that it could have more to do with being a TV-centric device than an iPhone or MacBook.

Let’s review: as far as Apple is con­cerned, as illus­trated by the nav­i­ga­tion in its home­page, there are three major lines of busi­ness: the Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone. And then, there’s the red­headed stepchild, AppleTV, which the com­pany con­sid­ers “a hobby.”

But while the com­pany claims to not be inter­ested in this mar­ket (even though the prod­uct was called out as a suc­cess­ful hobby on a recent ana­lyst call), it seems odd that it would be work­ing so hard to attempt to cater to the video-specific crowd: iTunes Extra, the rumored deal­ings with Dis­ney and CBS, the increased part­ner­ships to release movies on iTunes at the same time as DVDs (a move that Net­flix con­sider too bold) all seem to point to greater ambi­tions to get some level of con­trol over the third screen.

But what does that third screen really need? If you look at most the news com­ing out of the Con­sumer Elec­tronic Show this week, it looks like the rise of web-based video being avail­able either as an embed­ded option, or through a Blu­Ray player, or a sep­a­rate box, will soon be a given. Net­Flix is one of the early win­ners in this but where would that leave Apple. It has strong rela­tion­ship with the stu­dios (its own CEO is the largest sin­gle share­holder in Dis­ney) and a prod­uct that is about to become almost irrelevant.

“Send to TV”

But the func­tion that most TV screen present still needs some form of remote con­trol. That remote con­trol could (and does) come as an iPhone app but what if there were a dif­fer­ent way to expe­ri­ence con­tent from the inter­net. Some­thing like a “tablet” device that would allow some­one to surf the inter­net on a small­ish (maybe 10 inch) screen they could use when it comes to read­ing text. But, once a video com­po­nent shows up, they could press a “Send to TV” but­ton that would get the stream started on the big screen.

Attached to the TV would be a “sim­ple” device with either an RF or blue­tooth receiver, a net­work out­put (or built in Wifi over 802.11n), and an HDMI and power out. Inside that device would be elec­tron­ics that would have a small inter­net stack, a web server or a bon­jour bridge (for any form of admin­is­tra­tion), and enough video power to stream movies from a vari­ety of for­mat. The “receiv­ing” end of the soft­ware could also be added to exist­ing AppleTV soft­ware to ensure that the new tablet could talk to them.

Tech­nol­ogy is there already

Those tech­nolo­gies are mostly there, by the way. Apple has another small com­po­nent called Air­port Express that cur­rently can receive music from iTunes (and can be hacked to received sound from other sources). Adapt­ing it to receive video doesn’t sound too farfetched.

And Apple just released a soft­ware update to AppleTV to improve con­nec­tiv­ity between iTunes and the device over Bon­jour. Could Bon­jour be used as the mean of instruct­ing from the tablet to the device?

Clouds

So it’s not totally improb­a­ble that the AppleTV would play an impor­tant part of the tablet’s future. It could be one of three major fea­tures: cloud com­puter, e-reader, and TV on steroids.

The cloud part would include web-based ver­sion of Apple’s iWork suite, along with a new iTunes focused around the offer­ings of lala.com, and the me.com offer­ing for other basic ser­vices. It would also include instant on ver­sion of cur­rently avail­able for rent movies, lever­ag­ing the new large data cen­ter for stream­ing pur­pose. This por­tion of the offer­ing would counter much of the dis­cus­sion about net­books and their effect on the device.

The option of send­ing video straight to the TV would also “sim­plify” the device in that it may not nec­es­sar­ily need to include enough power itself for pro­cess­ing the video. This, in turn could help the com­pany lower the price-point of the tablet device (shift­ing the cost of video pro­cess­ing to the “add-on” every­one who doesn’t have an AppleTV will want to purchase).

So what do you think, is this a totally crazy idea? Chime in in the comments…

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