A Fresh Season of Apple Television Rumours ⇥ allthingsd.com

John Paczkowski of AllThingsD:

Jefferies & Co.’s James Kisner says at least one major cable operator is conducting tests to determine if it could handle the sort of bandwidth demands that a full-fledged, connected Apple HDTV might generate.

I’ve been skeptical of an Apple own-brand television set for a long time now. This was going to be another one of those posts, and I was going to point out that the market is kinda small (only 43 million LCD TVs sold annually), and that they’re necessarily expensive products, and that it wasn’t really a growing market (slightly shrinking, in fact), and that people don’t replace their television sets annually, or even every few years.

But then I remembered that Apple sells computers designed to last for about five years (maybe more, if you’re lucky). These computers are as expensive as an LCD TV. And that the personal computer market, as a whole, is shrinking. Yet Apple sells more and more Macs every quarter, and they’re growing, even in a shrinking market. And current market stats aren’t indicative of what a new entry from Apple could sell (remember tablets before the iPad?). All the frequently-cited reasons for why Apple won’t produce their own television set are wrong.