This is exactly what Microsoft has been building towards with the Xbox. The espn app on there is fantastic, and just added the ability to watch two events in split screen, while watching a customized news/score crawl at the bottom of the screen. You can invite friends to watch with you, and participate in quizzes relevant to the game you are watching. All this with Kinect voice support too. It feels pretty damn futuristic. And now they've announced apps for exactly the kind of services the article talks about: HBO Go, SyFy, Comcast On-Demand, etc. Add in the fact that it's already a game console, and I'd say they are closer to creating a central media hub than anyone else.
Haven't used the Xbox experience so I can't really say, but it seems like this could be another situation where Apple doesn't create an entirely new concept, but rather brings it to the masses simply and beautifully. I'd sure rather have an Apple experience when it came to TV
I just watched the rugby world cup at a friends house where the TV had a volume bar that honestly looked like a sperm. Wiggly tail and everything. It's not that Apple will get it right, it's that they'll do it less wrong.
It's interesting the players that will likely fight for the TV space - Apple, Google, Microsoft... and maybe Amazon. I wonder if Facebook has thought about it, or if they're just provide the social graph and friend activity on top of Apple/Google/Microsoft's own operating system for the next generation TV.
And these apps work well. There is some varying quality, but in the same way you see varying quality of apps in any store - Apple's included - or the quality of content, which is out of any "gatekeeper's" interest to control. An App Store that allows fart apps will be the same that allow "fart TV shows".
What makes me a little bit sad is that 3 years from now, you will hear how "Apple revolutionized yet another industry", when what happened was just them using their immense weight to corner another market and executing on an already established model. Hardly innovative.
