If Apple really has a revolutionary television set, it needs to offer one feature: It needs to offer advertising, during shows, which is targeted to the user, not to the geography of the cable system or the demographic of all the views in general. It needs to show me ads that are relevant to me.
Think about all the Google Adsense ads you see around the web. No matter where you go, you see the same set of advertising, because the ads are aimed at you specifically.
Apple has the opportunity to partner with content creators to offer advertisers the ability to buy specific demographics and they can do so in an auction format like Google uses. This means that content creators will make more money, cable systems will make more money for their coop advertising, and Apple will take a dime out of every dollar.
All that being said, there needs to be a critical mass of viewers out there to make this worth while. So the features of the TV have to be compelling. At the size and prices we're talking about for the TVs in the articles, the buyers aren't really concerned about saving a few bucks on their cable packages that unbundling offers. So it will have to be something else. That, I will leave to the rest of the Internet to predict.
But given that the money in this will come from an ecosystem, not just from product sales, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that either (a) the last revision of the Apple TV puck was really getting the hardware ready to do this or, (b) there will be a new Apple TV puck that offers all these features to allow any TV to become more like an Apple TV (perhaps without Siri or some other nice but not essential feature).
If I'm right, you read it here first!
