Google and Apple Finally Teaming Up?

nieske writes "Rumors are spreading about Google and Apple teaming up to form a video alliance. Google might provide streaming video content for Apple's upcoming iTV, which was revealed in last week's Apple event. The only thing that seemed to be missing in the iTV preview was streaming video, and with Google's Eric Schmidt on the Apple board of directors, this alliance might actually not be so far-fetched."

Comments

Poo Pooing ITV

[esconsult1]

Lots of people dismiss this product, but the kicker for me is that its priced so I can put one in each room with a TV, instead of a PC beside each TV.

Imagine watching Youtube on your bigscreen... (on the other hand, with that crappy video, perhaps not).

Bandwidth?

[cca93014]

Back of napkin maths...

My MythTV box in the UK consumes about 1.4 GB of data per hour of programme. That equates to about a 400kbit/second bandwidth requirement to be able to stream broadcast quality standard definition video (I think? Can anyone confirm that?). So basically I'd need at least a 4Mbit ADSL/Cable connection to stream video in real time and that's without enough of an overhead to ensure a 99.9% free picture.

What resolution did they say the iTV was running at? If I download a film from iTunes, what resolution is it? 640x480? That's a fair bit less than PAL. Maybe they could use a different codec to squeeze some more performance out of it, but it seems that the bandwidth requirements are pretty high right now...

The problem is that my dad, for example, expects the TV to work, when he turns it on, all the time. If he turns on his TV and gets some "buffering" messages up, he's going to take the thing back to the shop and tell the guy that sold it to him that "it doesn't work properly"...

Anyone else think that streaming TV is just not ready yet? I'd say we need another couple of years at least...