PBS’s Cringley, always a source of interesting conjecture, thinks he knows. Apple wants to turn your living room into a micro server farm. Cringley believes that the hard drive within the Apple TV will act as a node on a P2P network made up of Apple TV owners, allowing BitTorrent-like distributed sharing of key content.
This serves to eliminate the server-to-client download model that iTunes currently uses, which costs a fortune, as bandwidth is not free. By allowing the Apple TVs to talk to one another and share the content, the burden falls to the local ISPs, though when diffused in this manner, it’s hardly a burden at all.
Is Cringely right about this? Only time will tell, but the though of on-demand HDTV via distributed broadband mesh networks isn’t totally out of the question, and would fundamentally change how digital media is delivered to the livingroom.
What’s that 40-gig hard drive doing inside my Apple TV? [I, Cringely]
Cringely’s speculation is silly. Apple has been clear about the reason from the hard drive from the beginning. Apple TV functions as a kind of large video ipod, and the hard drive is for automatically (or selectively) syncing with your iTunes library so that you don’t have to wait for a stream from a connected computer (or even have the computer on) in order to play content on your TV. Details here:
http://www.apple.com/appletv/sync.html
This isn’t Cringley’s idea … or at least he wasn’t the first to think of it … there was speculation last year that that some form of P2P model would be employed by Apple in future releases of iTunes …. he’s simply extended it include @TV.
Not only is the speculation old, Rupert Murdoch’s Sky is already doing something very like that with its Sky By Broadband service, which uses a P2P network to download and share content between subscribers.
The Sky service is fast, with good quality content, and free for subscribers of the DTV service (though downloads are time limited). One drawback is that time limited content remains on your hard drive when the DRM licence expires to be shared with other users…