Apple breathes another lease of life into AppleTV
Just when you thought AppleTV had breathed its last … Cupertino announces an update to its media box platform!
Just when you thought that update would never come … the Jobs Empire files a patent pregnant with goodies for AppleTV and even the prospect of its promotion to a full set-top box!
The patent implies a hardware upgrade to AppleTV or a completely new version of the box allowing it to receive satellite or cable TV signals and feed them on to a TV screen along with an interface layer incorporating widgets, iChat, Instant Messaging and the ability to record to a hard disk just like a full-blown digital video recorder.
Widgets
The filing mentions “Telephonic or Cable TV Based Widgets”, “Display of Real-Time Information Widgets”, and “live iChat session widgets”. The small remote delivered with Mac Minis and other machines featuring Front Row seems to benefit from on-screen keys judging from these phrases.
Real Time Information is illustrated by Apple by a user watching a live sporting event on a HD TV set through the AppleTV box. The users can use a widget to download information about the event perhaps live information including score, statistics etc. The data could be sourced from an internet connection via RSS feed or some other digital feed.
Prospects
The current AppleTV can only receive media from its internal hard disc and through WiFi. To achieve the patent’s ambitions Apple would have to allow AppleTV boxes to input broadcast signals either via a anologue to USB converter (unlikely) or a collection of video inputs mounted on the board.
Even if Apple does this will it allow users to record copyright broadcasts onto the internal hard drive effectively turning the box into a DVR? Given the leverage the studios have with Apple through iTunes TV and Movie rentals we can probably expect there to be some protection preventing any ‘fair use’ recording of broadcasts at least beyond any ridiculously short retention period.
February 10th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
It’s questionable whether all of Apple’s iTV patent applications will be approved, since so much prior art exists on this subject. For example, AOL owns several patents that describe exactly what Apple wants to do on the TV — community overlays and streaming news/sports data.
In the case of AOL, users were placed automatically into chat rooms based on the TV tuner data. So everyone in the room was watching the same show. Very cool for its day.
One of AOL’s patent authors has an interesting post at http://www.broodingsavage.com/journal/2008/2/10/apple-patents-time-machine-appletv.html