I see Apple either liscensing some sort of built in "
tv" technology to TV manufacturers or building a TV themselves.
Doubt it. The benefit of AppleTV standalone is that it integrates with many types of HD displays.
Licensing out AppleTV's user interface, etc. to other manufacturers is unlikely as Apple has under Steve Jobs direction regained the wisdom that they are first a hardware company. They tried licensing Mac OS to other manufacturers and it was a disaster because the lack of quality control ruined Apple's reputation just like it's beginning to scar Microsoft's reputation with endless patches, driver problems, etc.
Apple is about integrated solutions where they can control the quality of the user experience from top to bottom... and they do this well.
However, integrating a TV is a risk because there's too many competing options... They do computer displays because they have other hardware that helps push display sales. But look at the price points on displays... tremendously expensive to cover the hefty cost of the components plus Apple's margin. If they did a real TV it would also have to have display technologies from other companies, and in combination with their pricing strategy to avoid cannibalizing sales of their existing displays and keep it in a logical progression of price points to feature sets, the Apple "TV" would have to be more expensive than the $1800 30-inch Cinema HD. So if it's a 40" Cinema HD Apple TV what do you think it's going to cost... $2000? Hah... stick in a QAM/8VSB tuner in there, the hefty cost of an aluminum casing for a 40 inch TV, and feature sets on par with any 40" LCD and Apple's price point will easily reach well over $3000 for a TV that can't compete with Sony's SXRD XBR Liquid Crystal on Silicon displays that are far superior to LCD.
Leave people the freedom to pick whatever the hell TV they want to go with the one AppleTV unit... and keep Apple out of the hairy maintenance issues associated with some flatscreen TV's. That's another thing... the costs of supporting the initial one year warranty on a full blown TV could be unpredictable for Apple.
AppleTV is so idiot proof to connect to any HDTV that it defies their sense of industrial design to incorporate it into the display. In fact, displays should be flexible... dumb.. simple... designed to display whatever source is input to it. All the "computing" tasks should be left to external devices like a computer or an AppleTV box.
Yes, existing cable converters and DVR's have idiotic ergonomics when it comes to their menuing systems but my thought is that AppleTV will spur a change in all that... twofold:
1. Improvements in UI.
2. Internet distributed a-la carte programming.
These will gradually become the norm, add to that:
3. The LAN as home entertainment/lifestyle backbone.
One thing that does make sense to integrate into a display is a camera... simply because of the ergonomics and the basic concept of WYSIWYG. If I'm videoconferencing, it makes most sense to look directly into the display. This is why Apple is researching the development of displays whose surface area acts as the camera instead of having a pinhole camera atop it. THIS makes sense... again because the input/output are symmetrical. I'm looking at the display, the display is looking at me.
AppleTV however serves multiple purposes... music and video. So which device do you integrate it in? A receiver? A TV? A preamplifier?
The microsoft answer would be to stick it in all of them with a mediocre implementation that makes them cost effective.
The Apple answer is to forget shoehorning them into other devices and focus on one sharply designed standalone that can interact with all those other components easily.
