One of the most compelling announcements at Apple’s “It’s Showtime!” event on September 12th came near the end of the show, where Steve Jobs came out and announced a new product coming in January currently codenamed the “iTV,” a set-top box that will connect to your television via HDMI or component, presumably, with analog RCA audio jacks, that will also function as a wireless media center.
The iTV would connect wirelessly to any other computer on your home network that has iTunes installed and allow you, using an interface that looks exactly like Apple’s Front Row software on the iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook, and MacBook Pro, and an Apple remote like the kind that ships with all of those models of Macintosh, (looks like one of the old iPod Shuffles) to browse audio and video, download movies, video podcasts, and TV shows, and stream them from whatever computer they live on directly to your television in high quality.
People have been clamoring for a Mac Mini suited to a set-top media center for a while now, and this product looks like it’ll be something like it; it supposedly will run $300 USD and look just like a Mac Mini. Connect it wirelessly to your home network and any computer, not just the Mac Mini you have connected to your home theatre, can store music and movies and you can stream it all to your computer. In my head, this is an incredibly compelling product with incredibly intuitive and easy to use software interface in the form of Front Row, (which is something woefully missing from other media center devices and hybrids like the XBox 360 or PCs running Windows Media Center) and combined with the content library of the iTunes Store and the ability to stream content from the iTunes Store and hopefully purchase in front of your TV, this could really pave the way for more video and audio to be downloaded online and enjoyed in a home theatre environment.