If it could pull from an iTunes cached App on a local network Mac to live swap games or even partially load them mid-play, that would change things. Considering other iOS devices can already have their content 'synced' while in use and over WiFi this is actually a possible and practical option. I've seen others on MacRumors point out that using a TimeCapsule could also be used for similar App caching.
In my opinion, that is exactly how it would work. Modern games are a relatively small percentage of processing code and a lot of (mostly graphics & sound) data. The processing code portion needs to be on-board so the CPU can execute whatever needs to be adjusted on the display. The data is the actual images, models, backdrops, etc used to fill in what needs to be on the display. The
TV buffer could hold the current apps processing code on board and stream the data as it's needed... much like the
TV holds the processing code on board to decode a movie but actually streams the data that is the movie imagery on the fly.
Never-the-less, we can also consider that even "big" apps these days tend to be about 1GB or less. I downloaded Infinity Blade for iPad yesterday and it is 596MB in its entirety. If that could be pushed to the
TV, it could be stored entirely locally (no stream required).
My speculations about
TV app gaming are broader still. The real horsepower for image processing is going to be back at the computer rather than on the
TV, so I believe the setup will be for the computer- not the
TV- to do the heavy lifting and just stream the rendered video to the
TV. Processing on the
TV will probably be limited to simply sending the gamer's actions back to the computer so that it can adjust the image accordingly. If we want to imagine an
TV game app being as rich as XBox or Playstation, it will need the computing horses to compete head-to-head. That's not in the little box that is
TV but it is in the bigger box on that Mac somewhere else in the house. Do the heavy lifting there and then just stream what should be on the TV screen back to the
TV which- for the latter- would be little different than just streaming and playing any movie or TV show.
If I was betting on gaming apps implementations, this is how I think it would get done. Else, all apps with XBox & Playstation counterparts will be modestly-to-obviously inferior in detail and speed since the
TV does not have the horses of the dedicated boxes. New Macs in the other room though can do that processing very well.
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True, but running apps from a remote storage device entails some additional challenges ... like what if the remote unit is down or if there is a connectivity error, also streaming large apps across a network (especially over WiFi) maybe an issue.
Most likely apps if they exist will be installed onboard while media will be streamed.
What is one of these large apps that exceed 8GB now? If apps have to be installed onboard, then all
TVs are obsolete when an app store is opened (as it will take only a small app collection to fill 8GB).
While all iDevices have a kind of multitasking, they show only 1 active app at a time on screen. Stream over the 1 app we want on our TV screen at that moment and it can own up to the full 8GB buffer while we want to do whatever we want do with it. When we're done with it, it gets dumped out of memory and the next app can be loaded (just like how it works on other iDevices except the app doesn't have to be on flash memory inside the case because the
TV is designed to be always tethered to much larger storage on the master computer elsewhere in the house).
And as I just wrote, I don't think the answer is to have
TV doing the heavy lifting or heavy processing. I think the better answer is to offload that to the computer and just stream the resulting video back to the
TV. Then the
TV is still very much playing a kind of movie (stream) that happens to react differently based on us hitting a button or similar.
