Apple to Add Interactivity to Apple TV via Cable & Satellite

Advancing Apple TV: Accessing Contextual Information

In accordance with one embodiment of the present invention, an approach is provided for enabling a user to easily and conveniently obtain additional information pertaining to a set of media content that is currently being presented to the user.

According to this approach, a media access device (hereafter referred to as Apple TV) accesses a set of media content as well as some context information pertaining to the media content. For purposes of the present invention, the media content may be any type of content that can be presented to a user, including but not limited to video-only content (e.g. pictures, slideshows, graphics, text, etc.), audio-only content (e.g. music, speech, etc.), audio/visual content, generally referred to as video content (e.g. movies, shows, live events, etc.), etc.

The context information may be any information relating to the media content. For example, the context information may include some basic information about the media content (e.g. title, author/creator, director, actors(s), synopsis, etc.) as well as some other information (e.g. an address to a site at which additional information about the media content can be obtained). The context information may pertain to the set of media content as a whole or just to a particular portion or aspect of the media content.

Upon accessing the media content, Apple TV will provide the media content to a presentation device for presentation to a user. The presentation device may, for example, be a television, a stereo system, etc. While the media content is being presented to the user, Apple TV will generate a context message based upon the context information. Apple TV will then send the context message to a receiving device being used by the user that is capable of consuming the context message. Examples of a "receiving device" include but are not limited to a tablet, a smartphone, a laptop or desktop computer, a notebook, etc.

Using the information in the context message, the receiving device provides the user with additional information relevant to the media content being presented. This additional information is provided to the user while the user is experiencing the media content on the presentation device. Thus, the additional information helps to enhance the user's enjoyment of the media content. By sending the context message to the receiving device, Apple TV will be in effect bridging the user's experience of the media content on the presentation device with the user's use of the receiving device to provide an overall integrated experience. By providing this bridge, Apple TV will make it much easier and more convenient for the user to access additional information relevant to the media content.

A Simple Scenario

To illustrate how this approach may be used advantageously, reference will be made to the above example in which the user wishes to obtain additional information pertaining to a topic that is being discussed in a set of media content. According to the approach, Apple TV may access (along with the media content) some context information pertaining to the topic discussed in the media content. The context information may include, for example, a summary of the topic, as well as an address to a site at which detailed information on the topic can be obtained.

This next generation of Apple TV, according to the patent filing, will stream the media content to a presentation device for presentation to a user. Apple TV will also be able to generate a context message that contains the summary information and the address of the site.

When the presentation of the media content reaches a point at which the topic is about to be discussed, Apple TV will send the context message to a receiving device. In turn, the receiving device uses the information in the context message to provide additional information on the topic to the user. Specifically, the receiving device may display the summary information to the user. In addition, the receiving device may display a link to the site that contains more detailed information on the topic. Should the user invoke the link, the receiving device navigates to the site and obtains additional information on the topic for the user. This is done while the topic is being discussed in the media content. Thus, there is a nexus between the media content that is being presented on the presentation device and the additional information that is provided to the user by the receiving device.

With this approach, the user is no longer required to perform a search on the topic, review search results, select one of various possible links, etc. Rather, the user simply has to review the additional information on the topic that is provided by the receiving device, and if the user is interested in obtaining more detailed information on the topic, the user can simply invoke the link provided by the receiving device. With this integration between the media content and the receiving device, additional information relevant to the media content can be easily and conveniently accessed, which can lead to enhanced enjoyment of the media content.

Multiple iDevices will be able to Access Contextual Information Differently  

This approach can be particularly advantageous in a setting in which a set of media content is presented to multiple users, where each user has their own receiving device. In such a setting, Apple TV would send the context message to each of the receiving devices. The user of each receiving device would then decide what to do with the additional information provided by their corresponding receiving device.

Some users may choose to ignore the additional information, while others may review the information and even invoke a link to obtain more information. The main point is that by ignoring or fully exploiting the additional information provided by their receiving device, each user is in effect creating their own personalized experience of the media content. All the while, the media content on the presentation device is not changed. Thus, with this approach, each user is able have as full an experience of the media content as they want (with or without the additional information) without adversely affecting the experience of the media content by the other users.

Apple's patent FIG. 1 noted above is a block diagram of a system 100. One type of content provider is noted as being a remote content provider 112b. This type of content provider will be accessed by Apple TV through the network 106 and the Internet 110. Examples of this type of content provider 112b include but are not limited to remote media streaming servers and cloud servers. Another type of content provider is an external content provider 112c that provides media content via a medium such as cable, satellite, or air. Examples of these content providers include cable service providers, satellite service providers, and local broadcasters.

Apple's patent application was originally filed under serial number 070697 in Q1 2011 by sole inventor Matthew Hanlon and published today by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Here are a few of the more interesting Apple TV patents on record regarding menus and conceptual interactivity features (one, two, three and four).

Notice

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TV Will Be Apple's Undoing

To maintain its leadership, the company must give up control.

By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.

Apple had snafus under Steve Jobs—antenna-gate, MobileMe, the frequently obtuse Siri. Its latest snafu, a faulty maps application installed on the new version of the iPhone, isn't a testament to the inferiority of Apple's current management. The snafu will be easily rectified by, if nothing else, Google releasing and Apple approving a version of the Google Maps app for the iPhone 5.

For entirely different reasons, though, the map mess demonstrates why circumstances are turning against Apple's current business model. Simply, content is king again. However much it might benefit Apple's business model to force users to patronize its own maps app, the company won't get far in trying to deny them Google's far superior app. Apple for a while managed to tame the power of content and make it subservient, but that day is coming to an end.

Forget the maps farrago. Look at Apple's agony over the TV puzzle. Apple is frustrated because there is no solution to TV that will let Apple keep doing what it has been doing.

Like schnauzers overreacting to the postman's arrival, the tech press was in a tizzy a month ago on reports that Apple was talking to the cable industry about bringing cable's linear channel lineups to a future Apple device. But the technical feat is no technical feat. Time Warner and Cablevision managed to roll out iPad apps within days of the device's debut 2½ years ago.

These TV apps proved unsatisfactory not because of any lack of Apple magic, but because only certain channels were available, and because consumers were allowed only to watch in the home (the whole point of an iPad is its portability). Even so, the Hollywood studios that actually own the shows sued saying the apps violated their contract rights.

Apple's fans imagine the company can do for TV what it did for music: breaking up the existing distribution model. Forget about it. Television is about to demonstrate the inadequacy of Apple's own business model.

Video-content owners, including everyone from the TV networks and Hollywood and the NFL and Major League Baseball, aren't the music industry or even the book industry. Video-content owners aren't looking for a savior and ultimately won't be satisfied with anything less than an open ecosystem accessible by any device.

They'll have no choice: Content owners already see their business being upended by Netflix and Amazon Instant Video, with an approach adapted to digital ubiquity from the get-go. They also know, if they sit still, their current partners, the cable industry and its analogues, will simply take advantage, as satellite operator DISH is doing with its ad-skipping function that so infuriates the TV networks.

In such a world, Apple will have to change too. To maintain its position, the company will have to focus more on giving its devices superb access to content it doesn't control and hasn't approved.

Can Apple CEO Tim Cook and company make the turn? Two years ago, in a column on the Microsofting of Apple, we noted that a company preoccupied with products was in danger of becoming a company preoccupied with "strategy"—which we defined as zero-sum maneuvering versus hated rivals.

Yep. Apple's rejection of Google's superior maps is an obvious example, but it goes with the turf. Apple's spectacular success with devices naturally led to the temptation of a network-effects empire. To such empires, maps are just too important as a way to gather information about users and hit them with ads and e-commerce opportunities.

A similar miscalculation led Microsoft to treat Netscape as a mortal threat and into a self-defeating tussle with a reciprocally purblind Justice Department. The Web did indeed create enormous opportunities that were seized by companies other than Microsoft, but Microsoft is still around and doing fine.

Let it be said that some techies see evidence of a more rational impulse within Apple. They say Apple's browser and HTML5 support are conspicuously superior to Android's. Within Apple apparently there are teams committed to making sure Apple devices are competitive in the open-ecosystem world that is coming.

The real test will be for senior management. The time to worry will be if Apple's quixotic quest for TV leads it to block more realistic solutions that emerge on the open Internet. When Apple admits defeat about TV, that may be the best sign for the company's future.

On a final note, lagging investment in fixed broadband, rather than the failure of Steve Jobs to "solve" TV, is the real thing propping up the existing TV model.

Notice that virtually every effort to bring Americans superfast broadband so far has been married with TV: cable's bundled offers; AT&T's U-verse product; Verizon's FiOS fiber product. Even Google at the last minute discovered that it needs a TV offering to assure adequate take-up of the fiber it is rolling out in its Kansas City demonstration project.

As Google's late conversion mutely testifies, the uncertain economics of TV is why competitive fervor to bring us faster Internet has slowly leached out of the broadband sector. How TV content owners in the future will get paid is but the flip side of the question of how pipe providers will get paid.

These are our old friends, chicken and egg, but sooner or later the dilemma will work itself out. And when it does, expect the TV and broadband businesses both to reorganize themselves almost overnight.

What was Steve Jobs's vision for the future of TV?

Steve Jobs “very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant. ‘I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,’ he told me. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.” No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. ‘It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.’”—Walter Isaacson

Steve Jobs wanted to revolutionize TV in the same way he had transformed music. On page 720 of his biography Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson asks Jobs about Apple’s plans for television, and Jobs seems quite enthusiastic. It would be an end run around the old ways of receiving TV through a cable subscription, and it would offer television programming directly to customers, on demand. “I finally cracked it,” Jobs says.

It all sounds exciting (“magical” even). Apple had irrevocably changed music and cell phones in the previous decade. What better target than the world of television, a fat cow waiting for a dramatic shake-up?

And who better than Jobs and Apple to reimagine how consuming TV should look and feel for the next generation? Even if Apple isn’t the company to put it into action, Jobs’s vision will no doubt provide the blueprint for the next wave of “new TV” companies.

Apple-flavored TV

So what would Jobs’s vision have looked like?

The biggest rumor held that Apple was going to launch its own line of flat-panel televisions, putting the company front and center in the home electronics arena. This never came to pass, and the idea remains stuck in the rumor mill. “As soon as next year” is a common refrain.

The vision, popularized by both speculative bloggers and professional analysts, is everything you’d expect from Apple—revolutionary, yet far from surprising. You would turn on your TV, and find something similar to iTunes. Hot shows would be promoted up top, and a robust search engine would let you find everything else. The key word is everything. You'd have access to current shows, classic TV, everything. You could download an individual episode, buy a full season pass, or stream shows in real time. You'd pay à la carte for all of it, and you'd no longer spend $80 a month on cable TV.

Of course, the hardware would be elegant above all, with the iMac as the natural design inspiration, but oversized for the living room. You’d get a simple remote (as with the current Apple TV), but you could use your iOS device instead. If you've paid a little extra for the “enhanced” version of The Walking Dead, you'd have no need to pause your TV watching with your iPad doing double duty as a TV guide, remote control, and “second screen.” Connections to Facebook, Twitter, and the like would let you get a picture-in-picture stream of gossip and commentary whenever you wanted it.

Naturally, Apple wouldn’t leave finding new shows to the masses. Editorial staff and a Genius-like recommendations engine would ensure that you’re never without fresh material to watch. A ratings system, such as the ones that Netflix or TiVo offer, would likely ensure that your voice is heard, too, basing future recommendations on what you tend to watch the most.

A set-top box?

Looking at Apple’s television business today, you’d be hard-pressed to say that the company has cracked anything at all when it comes to TV. Today Apple TV remains little more than a niche product for the company (Jobs called it a “hobby” in 2010), though Tim Cook recently said sales had doubled in the first half of 2012, with Apple moving 2.7 million units during that time. (By comparison, the company sold about 26 million iPads in the same period.)

But there’s evidence that Apple is plowing forward with television, despite all the obstacles. In August, the Wall Street Journal cited anonymous sources that suggested Apple was indeed working on a set-top box that would “simplify accessing and viewing programming and erase the distinction between live and on-demand content.”

The system would purportedly store shows on a cloud-based DVR service and be navigable via an icon-driven on-screen interface that mimics the iPad. And thanks to the cloud storage, content would be available on any (Apple) device. (The story discussed only a set-top box, not a full TV.) Commentary and sharing over Twitter and other social networks might also be included.

Details are vague, but the device outlined appears to follow the app-centric approach. For example, users would tap an MTV icon to find out what hijinks are going on up at the Jersey Shore this week, instead of accessing an iTunes-like catalog containing every TV show ever made. Could Apple live with this arrangement? It may have to if it wants to be a serious player in television.

Dealing with content owners

In fact, serious sacrifices to content owners like MTV and distributors such as Comcast might water down the vision considerably.

Putting together the necessary business deals and licensing agreements would be a very, very tough sell. For music, Jobs was able to make favorable licensing deals with record labels and publishers because piracy was already rampant, and the music industry was suffering.

But the TV industry is different. It has learned from the music industry's experience with the Internet, and it has gone to great lengths to control where and how video content becomes available. So the TV industry isn't as likely to cede that control to Apple's digital distribution system.

Sure enough, Apple has lots of TV programming for sale—it’s actually the far-and-away market leader in online episodic sales—but the availability is spotty. Some content is newly aired (mostly network TV), and some material is old stuff that hits when the DVD comes out (anything on HBO).

Many content providers don’t mind letting Apple sell individual episodes—$3 for an episode of Glee isn’t bad—but purchasing shows separately isn't the same experience as plopping down on the couch to watch a few sitcoms. Heck, it isn't even like watching Netflix’s Instant streaming service. Downloading shows one at a time and paying for them piecemeal is far from the seamless, integrated solution Jobs was envisioning.

To move toward Jobs's vision, Apple will have to convince networks and cable operators to give it access to real-time, present-day programming. That won’t be easy—and it may not be possible.

Kevin Boyland, a media industry analyst with IBISWorld, says that such deals with cable companies and content providers are the Achilles’ heel of the strategy. “Most people think a revamped Apple TV would be some sort of device with both live content and streaming from your Mac," he notes. "But cable providers want to control the access and user interface for that content, and companies like Comcast are actively and aggressively investing money in upgrading and rolling out their own user interfaces, so there’s a lot of reluctance for them to hand over control to Apple.”

In other words, the cable companies hate Apple, mainly because they saw what it did to the music industry.

Content compromise

What Apple could more easily get is a licensing deal with cable providers that lets existing customers access their cable service through Apple’s box. “That wouldn’t disrupt anything,” says Boyland. Essentially, that kind of strategy would amount to putting a Comcast app on your iPad, or doing a similar kind of deal to the one that cable outfits struck with NBC to stream the Olympics online.

Even if the idea did pan out, Apple would have to make a deal with every regional cable company to serve the whole country. It’s natural to ask next: Why not cut the cable companies out of the equation and deal directly with the content creators and distributors themselves? The reality today is that you can’t, because in many cases, the cable companies own the content creators—NBC and Universal, for instance, are part of Comcast, and Time Warner owns HBO. The tight integration of content with cable, says Boyland, now makes a successful reinvention of Apple TV “highly improbable.”

Dan Cryan, another TV-focused analyst with IHS, is more bullish on Apple’s prospects, noting, like Boyland, that the company has two choices: Go with an app-store model like the one described above, or make deals directly with content or cable companies to rebroadcast everything.

But in Cryan’s mind, an even larger challenge is how to take Apple TV international. The company has been increasingly focused on global launches, but the highly regional nature of television makes this task much more difficult than, say, launching an iPad in a dozen countries. “How do you sell U.S. TV into Europe? Into China?” he asks.

Regardless, Cryan believes Apple is up to the challenge. “I think this will come together in the future,” he says with confidence.

The problem with TVs

Even if Apple does figure out a way to get the content it needs—either through direct deals or an app strategy—then what? What kind of hardware might Apple launch to replace the $99 hockey puck (Apple TV) it’s selling now?

As noted, many people have speculated that Apple might launch its own Apple-branded television set with these services built in. Something like an iMac, sans computer.

That may happen, but it doesn’t quite mesh with Apple’s strategies to date. Says Boyland: “The typical Apple product life span is about two years. The typical TV has a life span of seven to eight years. Launching a TV just wouldn’t fit well with their market and upgrade approach.” The conventional wisdom seems to hold that Apple may make a go of it anyway. The potential rewards from taking over the home electronics aisles are just too great.

None of Apple’s future partners or competitors will talk about any of this. Representatives for Netflix, TiVo, Microsoft Xbox, and YouTube all politely declined to speak about what Apple’s vision for television might be. A Netflix spokesperson put their reason for declining comment rather eloquently, saying, “We can’t speak on behalf of Steve.”

Isaacson, Jobs’s biographer, also declined to elaborate on what Jobs might have been thinking. His publicist sent a statement reading: “Out of respect for Apple, [Isaacson] made a decision not to put in all of Steve Jobs's discussions with him about future products such as TV, and he doesn't want to add now to what he says in the book.”

The iPad Wins Because Android Tablet Apps Suck: An Illustrated Guide

That's the conventional wisdom, at least. The assertion is hard to test, but I wanted to try. Comparing app availability is difficult. You can't just compare the number of apps available, especially when Google won't give a number for Android tablet apps.

So I assembled my own list of potential app providers. To create a list of top brands, I looked at Nielsen's top 10 global Web companies, online video destinations, and U.S. TV networks; Alexa's top 10 U.S. websites; the top 10 retail banks as measured by the Federal Reserve; 10 top online game publishing houses; Nielsen's top 20 Android apps by usage; and Apple's top 10 paid and top 10 free iPad apps by usage. I looked for official apps from each of these companies.

The First Problem: Finding Android Tablet Apps
Finding tablet-oriented apps for Android is a hunt, a chore, and a grind. You can find some by looking in the very small Suggested for Tablets area on Google Play, using search terms like "Tablet" or "HD" in Google Play, or using the Tablified Market third-party directory ($1.49).

Things get even worse when you realize Google Play shows different apps on its website and on individual tablets; even though the Google Play website claims some apps run on an Asus Transformer Prime, the apps didn't show up on Google Play on the Prime.

And just because an app claims to run on tablets doesn't mean it was designed for tablets. Often, after you download an app you'll discover that it's ugly or nearly useless because it was designed for a 4-inch screen. The frustrating discovery process is one reason our software desk was able to come up with a list of The 100 Best iPad Apps but only 12 great Android tablet apps.

There's a slice of geeks who won't care, generally tech types who want to experiment and aren't afraid of some trial and error. They'll be rewarded with unique Android app categories like widgets, BitTorrent clients, and game emulators. But for the mainstream consumer, hunting down and puzzling out Android tablet apps is just too complex and frustrating.

Still, though, I wanted to collect a list of popular brands and see how they compared on the Transformer Prime versus the iPad.

Android vs. iOS: The Apps
Superficially, the picture doesn't look so bad for Android tablets; almost all of the brands are at least represented on Google Play, and some display more apps per brand on Android than on the iPad.

The problem is that the Android apps are often formatted for phones. They'll work on tablets - barely - but they'll be ugly, with less functionality than their iPad counterparts. Items that could be pop-down menus or swipeable content require screen reloads. Little information is displayed per page, for instance, on the eBay app. Graphics sometimes appear low-resolution, distorted (as on the CBS Sports Football app), or are overlapped by ads. The number of clicks to do things increases dramatically.

I was wrong to say about Android tablets, "competing tablets don't have apps." Rather, competing tablets have apps that usually suck. Not all of them suck. CNN's Android tablet app is gorgeous. But most of them do.

Android was weak on apps from TV brands, with only one app from ABC compared to the iPad's 12 and nine from Disney compared to the iPad's 32. But it did well with dominant Web brands, offering 14 Yahoo apps to the iPad's five and seven Amazon apps to the iPad's 4. There are 20 Google apps for the Transformer Prime and only eight for the iPad; Google+, most notably, is missing on the iPad. Google's tablet apps look great on both platforms. Apple, Nielsen's number-nine Web brand, offers no Android apps.

Each OS is missing some major brands. The iPad has no official Wikipedia app, although there are several third-party versions. The Android Wikipedia app looks so bad, though, that it's not really competition. It's a reformatted WAP site on a tablet capable of displaying the full Web.

There's no LinkedIn app on the iPad, but once again the Android app is uglier and less functional than LinkedIn's website. Apps are supposed to provide more or faster functionality than their corresponding Web sites, but those Android apps don't deliver.

It wasn't hard to find apps that ran on the iPad but not on the Prime. In my initial search Hulu+ came up, along with ABC and USA TV apps. All of those iPad apps look gorgeous.

The Android platform has all of the top 20 iPad apps except for the game Tiny Wings. The iPad lacks three of the top 20 Android apps: Advanced Task Killer, the Amazon Appstore, and Google+. But I'd assert that for categories other than games, Android tablets' problem isn't app availability but app quality.

Android vs. iOS: Games and Geek Apps
Android games don't generally suck when played on Android tablets. There are just fewer of them.

To analyze the availability of games on Android versus the iPad, I looked at 10 of the top mobile game publishers as judged by Mark Fidelman of Technorati, with one swapped out: Gameloft, EA, Rovio, ngmoco, Digital Chocolate, Firemint, Glu, Hands-On, BigFish and Namco. I swapped Namco for PopGames, which I couldn't find in the stores because it's too common a search term. And I'm not counting Gameloft titles that aren't in Google Play, because most people don't know how to download those.

The iPad wins, 402 games to 176. Now, a lot of that seems to be Big Fish spewing 166 games into the iTunes store. 166 games! But even with that outlier out of the way, the iPad still wins 236-162. There are more major-label games available for the iPad.

Of course, there are entire categories of apps found on Android tablets but not on the iPad. Real alternate Web browsers. Widgets. Classic game emulators requiring illegally obtained ROMs. BitTorrent clients. Alternative app stores.

What all of those categories have in common, though, is that they're for tweakers. Geeks. Experts. The kinds of people who are likely to be reading this article, to be sure, but not the mainstream consumer.

In other words, an Android tablet might be better for you, reader, because you want to reinstall the OS and emulate a Super Nintendo. But that can't be a general recommendation if the apps from big, popular brands generally suck.

Why Android Apps Are Ugly
Way too many Android apps fall back on a design that looks like a late-20th-century WAP site: a stack of modules designed to look good on narrow screens. Unfortunately, that design is completely inappropriate for a tablet.

On the iPad, on the other hand, apps tend to use multiple panes or columns, which is a much better use of tablet real estate. This is actually a Google design recommendation for tablets. Developers just aren't doing it.

Android partisans argue that Google has given developers the tools to create great tablet apps, and devs aren't using them. They're right. Using a method called "fragments," the Android SDK is perfectly capable of creating multi-format apps that look ideal on differently sized screens.

There's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here for developers and users. Apple solved it, in a way, by making the iPhone app experience on iPads so bad that developers had no choice but to code for the iPad. The iPad runs iPhone apps, but not in a way in which anyone would be proud.

Most Android apps have always been resolution-independent, though, so developers and publishers could fool themselves into thinking their apps run Just Fine. They run, of course, in the sense that the code executes and they (mostly) fill the screen. So the developers stop there, able to check their "we have an Android tablet app" box. But the apps suck. Of course, it doesn't help at all that the two most-popular Android tablets, the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, are small-screen devices running an older version of Android (2.3), which doesn't support the Fragment APIs necessary to create truly universal phone-and-tablet apps. The success of these two small tablets is actually holding back rather than advancing the cause of larger Android tablets.

For the slideshow below, I took screen shots of apps from top brands on an Asus Transformer Prime tablet running Android 4.0.3 and an iPad 2 running iOS 5.1. I tried to shoot the apps in landscape mode, but some of the Android apps forced portrait mode.

Yes, I know it's a slideshow. I know you hate slideshows. I can't think of any way to present this other than a slideshow. Go look at it. The captions are important.

The Sad Conclusion
The upcoming round of Android tablets is, hardware-wise, a match for the new iPad. The Asus Transformer TF700, for instance, has a slightly lower-resolution screen (at 1920-by-1200 compared to 2048-by-1536) but a faster, more powerful CPU in Nvidia's Tegra 3. The initial model of the TF700 will lack 4G, but will include expandable memory. It can trade specs with the new iPad blow for blow.

We'll continue to rate such high-quality tablets highly. But until applications from major brands come out in not only similar number, but similar quality for Android tablets, it'll be hard for one of them to beat the iPad to our top award.

“‘Tis the season,” well, it isn’t yet but we’re heading that way and it seems inevitable that with pine trees across the planet shivering as they hear the approach of the woodsman’s axe another shiny Apple [AAPL] product rumor hits the airwaves, this time claiming the company’s unicorn-like “will they, won’t they” Apple television launch is “imminent”, whatever that may mean.

Turn on

It may be best not to heap too much scorn on these claims, coming as they do from Jefferies & Co’s analyst, James Kisner, via All Things D. The analyst claims “at least one” cable operator is testing their network to find out if it can handle the bandwidth demands a connected Apple HDTV might generate.

What isn’t immediately clear is what kind of similar tests have been made of sundry Internet-connected television sets or set-top boxes by cable operators in the past.

That calls to mind previous reports into Apple’s plans for its television set.

These reports have speculated that the company intends offering a combined user interface which enables users to access conventional broadcast channels, iTunes services (including a more advanced and personalized sequence of television offerings) and, hopefully (because if it doesn’t offer support for this there’s little point) support for third-party streamed TV services such as Lovefilm or Netflix, and the like.

Tune in

These sundry offerings would in theory be made available via an Apple-created user interface, likely high on the eye-candy and replete with iOS device support so you could easily manage what you’re doing using your iPhone, for example.

You could also anticipate existing Apple TV services would be included within this, and it is possible -- given Steve Jobs’ claims that he’d dreamt up a new user interface for TV -- that Siri support may enable spoken word commands for what you watch. And naturally this also extends to provision of support for games on the device.

This vast collection of online services would presumably make great demands on cable firm’s precious bandwidth. With that in mind, the idea operators have a desire to test such a solution makes a little more sense.

That an analyst believes such tests have begun doesn’t necessarily mean Apple’s any closer to shipping the device -- despite recent additional claims of a Q1/2 2013 release. Apple’s negotiations with broadcasters have been extensive and it remains possible the company’s solution developed so far may not win their approval, though these purported tests do at least suggest some movement in those talks.

The analyst doesn’t quite see it that way, telling clients: “We believe this potentially suggests an imminent launch of the Apple TV.”

As AllThingsD states: “More recently, Time Warner Cable COO Rob Marcus told attendees of the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference that the company would consider selling TV subscriptions using third-party technology, even if “in some of those cases that may mean giving up control of the interface.””

Apple has been working away at this for years. However, like AllThingsD, I don’t believe these tests suggest an imminent launch. In addition to which, Apple’s head of iTunes, Eddy Cue, in August stressed his company at that time hadn’t yet been able to put a winning proposition together.

Drop out?

What does this mean? I think it means Apple’s on the way toward putting an Apple television set under people’s trees across Christmas 2013, but I won’t be saving up my pennies for such a system just yet.

There’s one more thing. Google. Apple’s solution for television sounds interesting, but its arch-rival continues to find ways in which to make leverage using YouTube.

Google’s online video sharing service is rapidly becoming a peer player in broadcasting, making investment in content and offering creatives a relatively no-strings-attached route to people’s eyes. The company’s Android ecosystem and its own TV products mean that content is available across an array of screens, while its Channels widen its reach.

The difference here is clear: Google’s television model already embraces the army of pro and semi-pro video creatives, offering up a wide array of content for a wide array of tastes.

Apple offers a more mercantile solution, in which it seems to be moving toward offering a fantastic interface via which end users can access any kind of commercial content, but there’s no guarantee it will include YouTube content in the end.

While Apple’s solution will be elegant and lovely and I’ll probably want one; Google’s seems better-fitted to the wave of mass democratization of content creation and distribution which is impacting the broadcast market at this time. And while in a sense it pains an Apple-holic to say it, it may eventually emerge as a solution that’s more appropriate to the increasingly diversified and democratized evolution that’s transforming even commercial broadcast content at this time.

“A year ago I think the premium content conversation was about iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, MSN and Yahoo,” Brian Bedol, CEO of Bedrocket, recently told AdAge. “I don’t think premium producers were thinking about producing original content for YouTube.”

It’s open to question if Apple’s extremely business-minded iTunes team can loosen up to the social media-driven change that’s transforming the broadcast industry, or if, as a result of its extensive conversations with stakeholders in that space, it simply delivers a place people can buy conventional content if they have the coin.

That’s where we seem to be right now, in any case.