rtdunham said:
Perhaps we've just been exposed to different sources of info. I viewed the sept 12 presentation in its entirety, and have read virtually all the reports and comments on macrumors, appleinsider, think secret, engadget, the wall street journal, and maccentral, among others. It was disney chief bob iger who was quoted saying iTV had a hard drive; that was generally interpreted (except by maccentral, which took the statement literally) to mean it had some sort of storage, be it flash or a small HD, and that it would be for buffering/caching to allow streaming of huge files at relatively slow (for the purpose) wireless speeds.
I've read absolutely everything I can too and I have to disagree with you still.
It makes absolutely no sense for Bob Iger to have been told there's "some sort of storage" if this isn't storage in any conventional sense. Storage to a layman means somewhere where you store things, not something transitory used by the machine in a way you can't fathom. So, we have two factors here:
First - Bob's been talking about a hard disk. That absolutely doesn't point at a cache, it's too expensive to be a cache.
Second - Even if Bob got the technology wrong, he's been told the machine has "storage". That's not a term you generally use to mean "transitory storage for temporary objects".
The suggestion Bob's talking about a cache is being made, in my view, because people know it'll need some sort of caching to overcome 802.11/etc temporary bandwidth issues (Hmm. Kind of. You guys do know we're talking about way less bandwidth requirements than a DVD right - and that a DVD-formatted MPEG2 will transmit realtime on an 802.11g link? What's more, for 99% of Internet users, their DSL connection has less bandwidth than their wireless link, even if they're on the other side of the house with someone else's WAN in range and on the same channel. Yes, 802.11 suffers drop-outs, but we're talking about needing seconds worth of video effected, not hours) As such, you're trying to find evidence that it'll deal with caching.
YOU DON'T NEED TO. A few megabytes of RAM is enough to ensure smooth playback will happen. This is a non-problem. Everyone who's going this route is putting way too much thought into designing a solution to something that isn't hard to solve.
Nonetheless, because it's an "issue", everything is being interpreted in that light. If there's "storage", it must be because of caching! Well, in my opinion, if there's storage, it's almost certainly to do with storage. You don't need it for caching.
I'm trying to imagine a conversation with Bob Iger where the issue of flash or hard disk space for caching content to avoid 802.11 issues would come up, and where the word "storage" would be used purely in that context. It's hard. I don't see them talking about caches to Iger. It makes no sense. They might just as well talk about DCT transforms or the Quicktime API.
I'm perfectly willing to be wrong. But i don't think i am. Let's continue reading the reports and revisit this subject here in a day or two.
Sure. I'm perfectly willing to be wrong too. I'm certainly less sure of it than I am of the iPhone rumours being bunk.
Regardless of the truth, I have to say the iTV makes little sense unless, regardless of whether it contains a hard disk or not, it can stream content directly from the iTS. Without the possibility of being used as a computer-less media hub, it becomes an overly expensive and complicated solution for what could more easily be done by making a bolt-on similar to that awful TubePort concept.
I'm 99% sure the machine is intended as an independent hub that can use iTunes libraries on the same network but can also go to the iTS directly and view content straight from there (and possibly other sources, such as Google Video.) I can see why Apple would make that. I can see why it would take a $300 machine to do that and make it practical. I see the importance of the iTS and the potential dangers to it as the cellphone displaces the iPod, and Apple's need to shore it up. I can see studio executives "not getting it" with online movies if those movies can only be seen on laptops, PCs, and iPods.
If Apple does force the thing to need a computer, I think they need to come out with an 'iTunes server' box that can fufill the same role, and it has to be cheap.
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