Apple is courting HBO and others. Why else but for the rumored Apple television (1 Viewer)

Apple is in talks with Viacom, HBO, Disney, ESPN and numerous other production companies, about creating a new content service for their rumored Apple television. Apple’s plan is to bundle channels into apps that stream content directly to the unannounced Apple’s special television. According to leaks, Apple's vision is to entirely remove the need for any kind of STB in the living room. It sure would be nice to have one less component. However, they would really need to get ALL the content that one can get on cable/satellite for people to come.

If Apple could pull this off, then the "cord cutting" phenomenon could finally descend upon us. Of course, can streaming content be as good as cable or satellite? With the recent approval of the H.265 specification, it probably could be. A new codec for a device that does software decoding, wouldn't need new decoding hardware.

You mean you have to buy their probably expensive special TV to watch those channels? If so then they can count me out!

Why else? How about 4K content? Maybe the Apple television is nothing more than a 4K TV using the iTunes store as the front end/distribution system.

As we have seen with HBO Go, I find it unlikely Apple could strike deals with a significant number of the content makers without the consumer having to already have been subscribing to the channel(s) in question through their cable provider. If they figured a way around this, great! However, I doubt they did.

There is also the practical problem of bundling a STB into a television. Those are two different products that traditionally have very different life cycles. Of course they could get around this with a modular system but that doesn't seem very Apple like.

-Keith