Apple and Nintendo In My Living Room

Apple’s “Showtime” event on Tuesday held little surprises for the majority of the time. The new nano looks great, I think it should been renamed the miniMini, but other than its new appearance, the rest was expected. Larger video iPods were also to have more room to hold the expected movie downloads from Disney owned studios. I can’t remember any rumors of changes to the Shuffle, so maybe we’ll give that the status of a minor surprise. A lot of people were hoping for the “true video iPod” with widescreen, wi-fi and the ability to do your taxes, but I don’t think too many were shocked when it wasn’t announced (same with the iPhone).

The arrival of games for the latest iPods (and 5g iPods) was a surprise though and I was a little upset to find out I couldn’t play them on my nano. The minute Ms. Pac Man is available,  I will be ordering an 80gb iPod because I love that game. It also makes a good excuse for upgrading. My wife will completely understand paying $349 for a new iPod so I can play a $4.99 game that is probably in some collection at home anyway.

The most shocking thing that happened at the event was at the end, the announcement of iTV (name likely to be changed). Apple rarely, if ever, announces anything ahead of time. They like to control the hype and marketing of everything until the moment Steve Jobs unveils it at an Apple Event. To end the da by unveiling an unfinished, unnamed product was almost as much of a surprise as the product itself. The iTV, for those that haven’t heard about it in the last two days, is going to be Apple’s entry into the living room wars sometime in the first quarter of 2007. Place an iTV in your living room and you can stream more or less any media off of your Mac or PC to your nice big TV.

With outputs for hi-def built-in, you’d think we’ll soon see even higher quality downloads appear in the iTunes store when iTV is eventually released. I would be tempted to get rid of my dish to replace it with a nice over-the-air HD antenna for locals and get the rest of my TV viewing either from iTunes or elsewhere online (the new Democracy open source player is great). If iTV lets me stream anything I want from my computer that 600 channel internet TV everybody talks about sure looks a lot more promising.

With today’s announcement of Nintendo’s Wii featuring various channels of content (news, weather, etc), the Democracy player and Apple’s iTV, I just might change my feeling about how soon videos on the Web will replace TV. At least in my home, it could be early next year.