Is Apple taking over the tube?

I get as bored with mindless tech punditry revolving around Apple as much as the next person (I read John Gruber because he routinely has novel insights), but I am still a sucker for a well-written piece that speculates on drastic paradigm shifts lying just ahead. Adam Lisagor’s piece on Apple TV and the iPad possibly coalescing into some coups de grace of television as we know it sparked my imagination.

The idea here is that Apple TV, heretofore Apple’s “hobby”, has really just been waiting for its shining moment — its feasible distribution channel — to unleash itself on the unsuspecting masses.

But would Steve keep a hobby around for so long without any real plans for it? I haven’t asked him, but someone else did a couple of days ago at D8, and he said that the only barrier was a go-to-market strategy. People get their cable boxes, for the most part, for free or heavily subsidized by their regional content providers. So it is the toughest sell imaginable to offer a value proposition that would warrant spending additional cash just to get the same stuff in a different way. Now I’m not one to get all drooley over rumors (yes I am) but when Engadget broke news last week about the next version of the Apple TV box being 1) cheap ($99), 2) run on iPhone OS and 3) streaming-only, without internal storage, I got excited. There are pieces of this hobby that are starting to fit together, and once they do, the hobby will have matured into something important.

Does the release of the iPad represent that shining moment? I have no idea, but jolly, synapse-stimulating stuff nonetheless. I’ve always loved the idea of the Apple TV — beautiful interface, a way to easily navigate movies and TV shows in a more personalized manner, etc — but it never made sense because of how clunky it has been in the past to move media to it. With the streaming and iPhone OS angle, it would suddenly make a lot more sense, particularly when you imagine the iPad housing similar capabilities. The Apple TV, then, becomes software you play on whatever desired hardware (iPhone, iPad, or HD TV) you have on hand. The apple tv (now lowercase) hardware is just a way to pipe the software into your TV, similar to the Netflix streaming disks for the Wii or PS3.

Oh, and I’m still waiting for Apple’s purchase of Lala to bear fruit. I’m sure that ties into the discussion somehow, but I’m not sure how.