Apple's iTV: What DON'T I See?

As follow-up to last Thursday's writeup on my predicted features for Apple's upcoming iTV set-top box, I also wanted to get down on cyber-paper what features I don't expect to see in the product.

• iTV will not include video inputs. Apple is a master at squeezing maximum profitability out of each hardware widget it sells. iTV could act as a video switcher, but why would Apple bother increasing the bill-of-materials cost to accomplish this? Displays already offer an ever-increasing number of inputs, and low-cost external video switchboxes alternatively address this function. And as you'll see next, Apple has zero motivation to provide recording functionality in iTV. The only way I can envision video inputs happening is by means of a USB2-tethered accessory dongle, which'd be similarly cost-structured and priced to ensure sufficient profitability for Apple.
• iTV will not be a PVR. While it's probably true that Apple only garners a small profit from each video track it sells on the iTunes Store (the company doesn't separately break out iTunes Store revenue and cost in its public financial statements), the company sells lots of video tracks; the cumulative profit is nothing to sneeze at. Why on earth, therefore, would Apple compete against itself by enabling iTV customers to record their own shows? Not to mention the additional cost incurred by video inputs (see above), the requisite additional, beefy and costly processor and memory for audio and video encoding and transcoding, and (for over the air broadcasts) the requisite additional tuner and demodulator. Yes, there's a HDD in iTV, but it's not for time-shifting. Time-shifting in the iTV world translates as "iTunes Store purchasing".

And by the way, for those of you who think that iTV is Apple's first attempt to blend computing and television viewing….think again (or is it think different?)