Disney CEO says iTV will come with a hard drive
During the same Goldman Sachs conference during which he announced first-week sales of Disney movies through iTunes, CEO Bob Iger revealed that he has seen Apple's upcoming iTV device in action and that it has a hard drive, a feature that many assumed would be missing. He said: "It can also stream it live through the box to the TV or it has a small hard drive on it so they can download what you put on the device on your computer, on your iTunes, through the television set."
Describing the device in response to an analyst's question, Mr. Iger noted: "It's a small box about the size of a novel, and not War and Peace, by the way. It plugs into the television like any other peripheral would, like a DVD device. It's wireless. It detects the presence of computers in your home; in a very simple way you designate the computer you want to feed it and it wirelessly feeds whatever you downloaded on iTunes which include videos, TV, music videos, movies or your entire iTunes music library to your television set."
In the transcript Mr. Iger continued: "So it is relatively easy to use, simple kind of plug and play, relatively easy. Actually extremely easy remote control device, DVD quality, not HD quality at this point. I find it to be pretty compelling. I saw it in a living room setting. It felt like a game changer to me in many respects, and as a content provider we are, that was very exciting."
He concluded: "What I like about it, by the way, it may be an opportunity to actually charge people for a TVR experience. In that if they've forgotten to set their TiVo device or their TVR or they just have no plan to do it but they want to watch an episode that they missed, they can go to iTunes, buy it for $1.99, [send it] to the set-top box source wirelessly and watch it on the television."
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