Will Apple's iTV be HD Ready ?

The web has been buzzing with speculation about the new iTV device Apple will ship in 2007. Unusually for Apple, CEO Steve Jobs gave a brief overview of the new device at the company's Showtime even in San Francisco in early September – Apple never talks about products before there finished.

Before dealing with the possibility of it working with HDTV, lets deal with what we know for sure.

It's a video and audio streaming device. It looks a bit like a Mac mini. It connects to your TV using HDMI or component video. It has digital audio outputs to hook up to your home theater receiver or amplifier. It can stream media wirelessly using the 802.11 standard or over Ethernet. It also has a USB 2 port and runs a more advanced version of Apple's Front Row software. It's primarily designed to stream movies, TV shows, music, photographs and podcasts from a Mac or PC.

Now the speculation. Disney CEO Robert Iger claimed that the device has a hard drive in it. Although this wasn't mentioned by Jobs. Iger may be right, but without a TV tuner, what would you store in the hard drive? Why would you copy stuff from your Mac to the iTV if it can be streamed wirelessly.

More interesting is the speculation surrounding the precise wireless standard. Currently most wireless networks use the 802.11g standard. That's fine for shuttling files and pictures around. And it's even great for streaming high quality audio and DVD quality video. It's not fast enough however, to happily cope with the increased data rates of high definition video. That requires a faster data rate. Thankfully, a new standard, 802.11n, which has a maximum data throughput of ten times that of 802.11g is in the process of being ratified by the IEEE. It's not yet ready for primetime though, which may be why Jobs was deliberately vague about which version of 802.11 the iTV would incorporate – Apple would like it to be 802.11n, but until it's ratified it can't confirm it.

Apple, of course, is a big fan of HD. All its video editing solutions support high definition video, and the H.264 codec – supported by Blu-ray, HD-DVD and used in European HDTV transmissions, is built into the company's QuickTime software. And Apple hosts high definition movie trailers on its website.

Currently the TV shows and movies available in iTunes are 640 x 480 pixels in size. However, those won't be the only two sources of content. Apple is reportedly in talks with Google over access to Google Video content. Currently Google recommends that video uploads are 640 x 480 pixels in size and have an aspect ratio of 4:3. But nothing stays the same. Video bloggers like Rocketboom already produce their content in HD and it's oonly a matter of time, storage space, and bandwidth before much of the content on Google Video is high definition. Likewise, Apple will, sooner or later offer HD movie downloads.

Then of course there's user-generated content. With iMovie supporting HD editing, it would be daft not to allow users to stream their productions in all their glory.

It may be that for starters, the only HD content you'll be able to stream on iTV will be your own movies and some QuickTime movie trailers – although it would be great if it could do EyeTV recordings too — however, given everything Apple has said and done in the past, it would be staggering if iTV didn't support HD streaming out of the box.