This is an incredibly strange analysis. Sacrifice iTunes to make a trivial amount more in hardware sales? iTunes is Apple's Office - it's the main thing they need to protect. - felix

It makes more sense to me for apple to start selling AppleTV apps in the App Store. Imagine the MLB App - which could show streaming video but also have all sorts of core animation based stats views, and interactive analysis etc. (not that I'm into sports - but it illustrates the point that Apple is a software company and capable of making an incredible interactive platform, whereas the competitors are really content aggregators) - Robin Barooah

Seems like Blockbuster is getting left behind as well. - Shevonne

@robin - I'd love to see the app store show up on AppleTV. I'm how close the iPhone OS is to the AppleTV OS. That is they both seem to be modified OSX's, it'd be cool if they were, you know... similarly modded. :) And I agree - Apple makes great platforms for developers... just that sometimes they don't love their developers enough. - felix

@jason - definitely, I'd love to see a modification of that 30/24 rule... especially the 24. My wife falls asleep during movies it'd be nice to at least turn the 24 into a 36 so she can finish the subsequent evening. :) I also don't believe Apple would be hurting itself by adding Amazon content to the available dl'able movies officially. Blend it in and people won't care where it comes from. When AppleTV becomes the defacto interface they can do all those wonderful monopoly'ey things that are inevitable. :) - felix

App store on the AppleTV would be fantastic -- I'd love to write applications for the platform. Writing "appliance" (to use the term loosely) applications for the AppleTV would be a lot of fun, and it has far, far more horsepower than the iPhone with which we could do some pretty neat stuff. - landonf@bikemonkey.org