Over at Engadget, Josh Topolosky has written about a tip his site received about the next Apple TV–which supposedly is essentially a $99 screenless, diskless iPhone which streams 1080p content from the Internet or a Time Capsule network drive. It would presumably tie into a service along the lines of the one described in a musty old rumor known as iTunes Replay. And it would clearly compete with existing boxes such as Roku and future ones based on Google TV.
(One major Google TV selling point which Apple TV definitely won’t match, at least in our lifetime: Google’s gizmo will play all the Flash-based video on the Web.)
Josh’s tipster didn’t say anything about whether the next-generation Apple TV would run apps. But if it runs iPhone OS, it feels kind of inevitable that it would–if not at first, at least eventually. Stock iPhone and iPad apps would make no sense at all on an HDTV screen, but ones scaled to the right size and aspect ratio might. Netflix, for instance, could create something akin to the Netflix interface on Roku. And games would be a no-brainer.