iPhone TV, gphone TV, g1 TV, what next?
If you’ve heard of Sling and the Slingbox then you will know that it is a truly wonderful piece of kit that lets you watch the TV signal that is transmitted to your home through any device that can connect to the Internet. This includes phones, computers and laptops. What this means in practice is that if you have Sky or Cable then you can watch that from your office or on the train on the way into work. Pretty amazing stuff.
This functionality is something that us iPhone owners would be really interested in getting to know a little bit more about: iPhone TV has been promised by Apple but is not yet a reality (though it is interesting to note that Apple has made a recent announcement to the effect that an iPhone TV app will appear in the apps store shortly!). You would have thought that Apple would be shrewd enough to do some kind of deal with Sling that would see the iPhone TV brought to us using the Sling technology.
Nope.
The problem is that if Sling have a piece of the pie then Apple lose a piece of the pie. And there’s only so much pie to go around. Any percentage of this iPhone TV pie is a significant amount of money, and Apple just are not interested – and do not need – to give it away. This means that iPhone TV is going to be just a little longer wait. Mac games are no less popular either.