Apple announced the Apple TV a while back and I haven't gotten around to writing anything about it. I think they did a great job on it. At $100 it's an easy purchase for people. Small, black and no big power brick anymore. It's a lot more quiet than a Xbox 360 or PS3. I think they'll sell a lot more than the old Apple TV. I don't think that's where the big differences lie.

On Apple's page the first thing they mention is All Streaming. No hassle. I think this is big. Apple found that people didn't like having to sync the Apple TV with their desktop/laptop. It's a pain in the ass. A big change is going to an overall rental strategy instead of buying TV shows. People are starting to realize that HD video is big and storing it is a pain in the ass. One drive failure and you lose a lot of data. They don't understand how to back it up and store it properly and it's awfully expensive too. A cheap rental should appeal to a lot of people, especially for TV shows. Paying $2-3 dollars a night to watch a few shows is something I'd do, but $6-9 I balk at. For a buck I'd even pay to watch a favorite episode over again. I'm not sure how the consumers will react to it, but I think the networks will find it a pretty good deal.

Air Play is another feature they announced, more with the iPad OS 4.2 rather than the Apple TV. I think this is going to be a huge part of Apple's strategy going forward on how you get data to your Apple TV to display. Stream music, photos and video. Watch part of the video at lunch at work, come up and touch a button on your iPhone/iPad and it's streaming to your TV in seconds. Are the kids watching Toy Story 3 on your phone in the car? Come home and it's up on the TV. A lot people already have photos on their iPad or iPhone and being able to show them so quickly on the TV will be great, you'll also have control over how they are displayed. They are already partnering with other computers to build Air Play into other devices. In a year or two I think they are going to see it everywhere. It's been blasted a bit for only supporting 720p video, but 1080i/p is rather high bandwidth for most internet connects yet. According to what I've read you need to have a 56" screen or large to really be able to see the difference. It's still not an obvious difference at that size, so this really won't matter to a lot of Apple's customers. Those that care about video quality that much probably aren't streaming video off the web anyway.

One thing we may see in the next year or two are apps for the Apple TV since it runs the same iOS as their other mobile devices. How the user will interact with them is still a question. I don't think users want an email client or web browser on their TV, but I'd love to see what developers would come up with. I think we'd see a few great apps.

I think it's still going to be a hobby for Apple, but this time the hobby is going to grow.