Did Apple TV just stop being Steve Jobs’ ‘hobby’ and move on to being a major new business for Apple?

Apple has announced that it expects sales of its new Apple TV to top one million units later this week.

Not that Apple has sold a million unts – but that it expects to reach that milestone later this week.

The premature announcement, combined with the fact that Apple has previously been tight-lipped about Apple TV sales, suggests that Apple is starting to take its hobby seriously as a business – and that the company is concerned about the growing buzz around competitors like Roku.

Apple TV and Roku players complete head to head, with the Roku XD Streaming Player coming in with better specs in some areas and a lower price. Roku is expected to sell a million of its Internet TV boxes by the end of the year.

What do you think? Did Steve Jobs’ hobby just become a business?

Mark Cuban shares some interesting thoughts at his blog on why the Internet is not disrupting TV:

If my memory serves me right, the common thread among industries (disrupted by the Internet) is that they all sold their products ala carte.

Music – By the CD

Newspapers – Single Newspaper (Dallas Morning News) sold by copy or subscription

Magazine – Single Magazine (Newsweek) sold by copy or subscription

DVDs – Single copy.

Blockbuster – Rent each DVD

In each of the above examples, the primary revenue stream from the product came from ala carte sales – the purchase of a single product.

Cuban goes on to compare this to TV:

TV is sold by aggregators who sell TV in bundles. Not ala carte.

Pick any TV distributor. They aggregate the channels they want to sell into bundles and sell them. From basic service to full service with every channel available. If you want to buy PPV or VOD content, you must first be a subscriber.

Look at Netflix. They sell NOTHING ala carte (like I said, smart as shit). You have to subscribe to their service, then you can select the content you want to watch.

Look at Spotify. Pay by the month or don’t play.

Cuban’s argument makes sense. It’s will be hard for devices like Apple TV and Google TV to disrupt traditional television when many traditional TV sources won’t make themselves available on the devices.

Cuban fails to take into account, though, the broader trend away from static, sit-back content towards new media that is more social and interactive. People are already dumping cable because they’re spending their time watching Internet TV – or using the Internet to do something more active with their time.

If Apple and Google try to compete against television, they’ll never win, because they’ll only have a fraction of the content to offer.

If they look at television as part of a broader variety of Internet activities that can be delivered to your living room, though, they can become the super-aggregators that Cuban is talking about – delivering Internet video, social media activities, video calling, games and, yes, television shows to your big screen.

Can Apple TV and Google TV compete with traditional TV? Leave a comment with your thoughts!

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Google today offered an update on Google TV – its new Internet television platform. And while Apple has been content to keep Apple TV as a “hobby”, Google is intent on making its Internet TV receiver a business.

Today they announced multiple content partners for Google TV:

• Turner Broadcasting has been optimizing some of their most popular websites for viewing on Google TV, including TBS, TNT, CNN, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim.
• NBC Universal has collaborated with Google TV to bring CNBC Real-Time, an application that allows you to track stocks and access news feeds while watching financial news.
• HBO will bring access to hundreds of hours of programming to Google TV with HBO GO.
• NBA has built NBA Game Time, an application that lets you follow game scores in real-time and catch up on the latest highlights from your favorite team in HD
• Amazon Video On Demand offers access to over 75,000 titles for rental or purchase
• Netflix will offer the ability to instantly watch movies and TV shows.

Other Google TV partners include USA Today, Pandora, Napster & Twitter.

While Apple’s recently announced Apple TV update will make the platform cheap to try and easy to use, Google TV is leapfrogging it and looks like it will be the first company to establish an Internet TV platform that’s open to developers.

While its too early to tell if Google will turn Internet TV into more than a “hobby”, by focusing on creating a developer-friendly platform, it’s moving in the right direction.

What do you think? Are you going to get a Google TV?

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You gotta love this – Boxee Chief Product Officer Zach Klein offers an introduction and demo of the first Boxee Box off the assembly line.

Compared to the typical stiff demo or the hyper-prepped Apple intros, it’s sort of refreshing to see Boxee do this lo fi, even taking out time to nom on the Wheat Thins.

The Boxee Box is an Internet set-top box that is being created in conjunction with D-Link. It’s expected to retail for about $200 and to be available by Halloween.

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YouTube has officially announced their online video editor, and they spared no expense on the introduction.

The YouTube Video Editor lets you:

• Combine multiple videos you’ve uploaded to create a new longer video;
• Trim the beginning and/or ending of your videos;
• Add soundtracks from our AudioSwap library of tens of thousands of songs, including hits from Kaboose & Braile, Kaboose & Tommy Percival, Kaboose (feat. Christin Hart) and more; and
• Create new videos without worrying about file formats and publish them to YouTube with one click.

We found the YouTube Video Editor to be painfully slow and close to useless – but you may reach a different conclusion after watching this YouTube Video Editor tutorial by expert Yeshmin Blechin:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Google today published this YouTube video that explains “What is Google TV?”

It doesn’t offer new info, but the video does help position the Google TV solution.

With Google TV, it looks like Google is trying to fork the Web, like the Apple iPad forks the Web – creating a new platform for Interacting with the Internet vs the Web.

What do you think about Google TV and its potential?

Internet video – content stored and distributed over an IP architecture — will eclipse the consumption of broadcast TV by 2020, according to research from The Diffusion Group (TDG).

According to TDG data, while the amount of time spent viewing TV has remained relatively stable, the amount of time consumers spent watching online video increased 84% between 2008 and 2009. When extrapolated across the entire TV-viewing population, the average time spent viewing online video in 2009 was 52% more than in 2008.

TDG expects that this rate of growth will actually increase during the next 5-7 years due primarily to the increased use of the television as the platform of choice for web video viewing.

“The total amount of time spent watching video from all sources, including PayTV and Internet video, will hold constant during the next 10 years at around 32 hours a week,” xccording to TDG’s Colin Dixon. “With online video usage accelerating, we expect the amount of Internet video watched to eclipse the amount of live broadcast TV around 2020.”

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The buzz of the day is Google TV – with most analysts having a Googlegasm and saying things like Louis Gray’s “While Apple Slept On Their Hobby, Google Executed” or Vince Veneziani’s “Google TV Is Now The Most Important Thing In Television”.

Google TV is certainly interesting – but it’s not likely to beat Apple TV by being a better Internet television box.

The growth of Apple TV has been limited by the facts that:

• television geeks already have mind-boggling options; and
• licensing deals keep sites like Hulu from making their content available on Internet TV devices.

Is Hulu going to be on Google TV? No.

Will it matter that Google TV supports Flash? No.

Will content providers be dumping their lucrative cable deals for Google TV anytime soon? No.

If Google TV is going to beat Apple TV – it’s going to do it for other reasons.

Here are five likely ones:

1. Your eyeballs should be more valuable to Google TV than traditional broadcasters. Google knows what you’ve been searching for, what ads you’ve clicked on in the past and where you live, so it can make it easier for advertisers to target you.
2. Google TV is going to be a development platform – and a jillion developers are going to come up with new ideas for things to do with a giant screen in living room. Things that aren’t on Apple or even Google’s roadmap. The first company to establish the living room screen platform will have a huge advantage.
3. Google TV bets on the idea that your digital stuff is moving to the cloud. Apple TV, iPods, the iPhone and even the iPad are designed around a convoluted computer-centric relationship with your digital stuff. If you want your photos on Apple TV, you’ve got to load them onto your computer and then sync them through iTunes to Apple TV. If you want to watch your home movies on your iPad, load them onto your computer and sync them – through iTunes. How about cameras that upload your stuff to YouTube and Flickr and having it just work with whatever device you want to use?
4. Google TV is brought to you by they guys that own YouTube – and Google can deliver a better living room YouTube experience to Google TV than it does to other platforms.
5. Google TV will  be porn friendly. Meanwhile – Steve Jobs wants to deliver a Disney-like Internet experience, free of porn unless you are explicitly searching for it.

What do you think? Is Google TV going to be the device that turns the living room screen into a platform?

GetMiro has announced that Miro 3 – the latest version of the free, open source multi-platform Internet TV application – is now available.

Here’s what’s new in Miro 3:

• Subtitles! If subtitles are embedded or in the same folder as your video, they will be available automatically in a new drop-down menu. Or pick any subtitle file.
• Faster Faster Faster! Miro is faster and snappier in all sorts of ways from downloading torrents to deleting lots of files. For example, launching Miro is over 150% faster! Downloading torrents is faster!
• Louder Louder Louder! The maximum volume for videos is now at least twice as high. Really nice for laptops.
• Edit file info Easily change the title, description, and category of a file.
• Play Externally We’ve added an option to play all files externally and a right-click menu for single items.

For more details of what’s new, see the Miro 3.0 Release Notes.

The number of unique viewers of online video increased 10.5% year-over-year, according to The Nielsen Company. While still impressive numbers, the explosive growth of a few years ago appears to be gone, replaced by slower, but still respectable organic growth.

Other highlights of Nielsen’s stats:

• People are watching more video – the number of streams watched is growing faster than the number of views;
• People are spending more time with online video – time per viewer grew 7%; and
• People are spending more time with long-form videos, time at Hulu is up and down at YouTube.

Details below.

Note: Effective with June 2009 data reporting, Nielsen has made several enhancements to the VideoCensus service, including a panel that is 8 times larger, more granular reporting and improved accuracy and representativeness. These enhancements provide the highest quality data to our clients and the marketplace. For some sites, trending of previously-reported data with current results may show percentage differences attributable to these product enhancements and should only be compared directionally.

Image: stevegarfield