Disney CEO confirms iTV has a hard drive under the hood

i mean not everyone who buys the iTV is going to stop buying from the iTS

not everyone who downloads movies and tv shows from the iTS is going to buy the iTV and everyone who buys an iTV is goign to stop download shows and movies from the iTS...so the iTV could have DVR functions i don't think a DVR iTV will be a big threat for the iTS

There's so much we don't yet know for sure about 2007 - Leopard's 'secret features'....

I wondered about this little beauty having a hard drive. Is it so far fetched to speculate that the 'iTV' will turn out to be the new Mini - 'MacNano' if you like??

Macs without optical drives aren't exactly new, and I reckon that most people who would buy this box for their living room will already have a DVD player/recorder under their TV. So Apple's living room MacNano doesn't need one - but that hard drive would help bring a whole lot more than just what's on your other Mac(s) to your sofa.

This is an exciting, interesting product - and it might just turn out to be a lot more than just a souped-up Video Airport affair.

thought there was all the stuff a while back about a potential Apple/TiVO joint thingamee? no?

My guess: Movie rentals.

The iTV will provide a closed system that movies can be downloaded to on a rental basis and it will controll how many times or for how long a movie can be watched before the rental expires and also prevent the movie from being copied to another device (hence no dvd burner for eg) and stolen.

Just a guess and I'm normally way wrong on these things.

Recording TV to your hard disk predates the TiVO. I had this feature on my old Performa 6400 almost 10 years ago. What they have patents on is the user interface, and the way it "intelligently" records things you might be interested in. Simple DVR functionality, anyone can do, otherwise Microsoft wouldn't be doing Media Center, Motorola wouldn't have their new streaming wifi-to-tv box, etc.

I don't see DVR functionality as a minus for this. In fact it's the *other* missing piece. Just as cable and satellite companies are happy to sell or rent you tuners with integrated DVRs that can record "free" TV, in fact it's not free because a) you're already paying for access and b) they're betting you will likely pay extra for premium channels, VOD, and PPV programming, much as iTunes enables you to not just rip CDs, but buy stuff, like season-pass subscriptions.

You said:
"11. I don't get what the difference between this and a modded xbox, sans the ability to purchase/play music from the iTunes store."

One big difference is the digital video output. I know most people don't care but there are quite a lot of hdtv's (the cheaper variety) that won't display 720p, only 1080i, over an analog connection. In other words, they are natively 1080i and will 'upconvert' 720p signals and display them in 1080i. I know this sucks, but the bottom line is that it means a lot of people with cheap hdtv's can't get any higher than 480p from an xbox, modded or not.

I doubt it would record tv out of the box, maybe through a hack or something (software).... if it does record tv that would be stepping on tivo toes (patent) and that would surely be a lawsuit, and with tivo's track record... they'd win butt loads of money from apple....

Roberto,
You are absolutely correct about the Wii ... I can't wait to get it.

I have been thinking about getting Widgets into front row for a while. When I saw it on the Wii it was an aha moment. Being a a fanboy I wanted fronrow to give me the same sort of "channel" function. It would also open up a huge market for the open developer community. I think apple needs give front row some capability to harness user generated apps / widgets.

IMHO this would make airport express a killer app.

On the other hand I am hoping that the Wii folks open up their channel platform to all developers and not just the ones who build games on their platform.

Ash

Is there a possibility that iTV will use flash memory instead of a hard drive? If the purpose is to buffer streaming video (admittedly a big "if"), then 1 GB of flash memory makes much more sense that a hard drive.