Maybe I'm just in one of "those moods" (last night's Presidential excuse for a debate might have helped cause this) ... but you know something? I'm really REALLY tired of all the excuses about how making this stuff work is supposedly a difficult challenge and tough to get right.
It's not rocket science! It's simply a matter of making a decent GUI front-end for selecting what you want to watch on TV or what you want to record for later. IMO, Tivo did a pretty darn good job of doing this the right way, YEARS ago, with technology far more limited than what's available for a reasonable price today.
Most competitors like to pretend Tivo never existed though, since that stuff is all patented/copyrighted and doesn't do them any good.
The real problem is simply that Apple can't get its way, getting all the content owners on-board with making everything available via the Apple branded set-top boxes, under any kind of licensing terms and conditions Apple finds favorable/profitable enough. So it keeps deflecting, talking about refocusing on these other supposed challenges of making a better interface to using your TV.
IMO, the *only* way Apple can really twist a critical mass of people to become AppleTV customers and regular users is by providing enough ORIGINAL content that's only accessible with one. That's going to be a big financial expenditure -- but probably no more than it wasted on the now scaled-back electric car project.
There are a lot of great television shows that were cancelled prematurely for various reasons, and others that someone wanted to produce but the pilot episode didn't make the cut for a network. IMO, Apple could get a LOT of mileage out of simply paying up to revive a bunch of those. A third season of Jericho, anyone? Bring back FireFly?