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Apple has been meeting with top execs from content providers to describe its upcoming TV project, but the plans are still at the vision stage and Apple hasn’t licensed any content for it yet.
One of Steve Jobs’ final visions was to reinvent TV, and he told his biographer Walter Isaacson earlier this year that he’d “cracked” it.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Eddy Cue and others from Apple have met with media executives from several large companies to describe that vision.
The TV would grab video over the Internet using a home wi-fi network, and users would be able to control it with their other Apple devices, like iPads or iPhones. There might be some voice controlled element like Siri on the iPhone 4S, and perhaps gesture control like Microsoft has with Kinect and Xbox Live.
But one source familiar with the talks told the Journal that Apple’s plans are still “vague,” and the company doesn’t know (or isn’t saying) when the product will launch, or whether it will support traditional TV signals, or only have content from iTunes or another Apple service.
It sounds a lot like the product Apple analyst Gene Munster described earlier this month — a full-fledged TV with a mix of traditional cable content (delivered directly to the set through a coax cable) and content from some Apple service (delivered over the Internet and a home wireless network), all controlled with Apple devices.
The biggest mystery is whether customers will be willing to pay twice as much as a regular TV set for whatever Apple comes up with.
See also: The History Of TV Failures Leading Up To Steve Jobs’ Final “One More Thing”
Article source: SAI http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/dv7yT9NHCvc/apples-tv-plans-are-still-vague-but-heres-what-theyre-telling-media-companies-now-2011-12