Boxee will be showing off a prototype of its widely anticipated standalone set-top box at next year’s Consumer Electronics Show, according to a source close to the company who asked not to be named, with commercial deployment slated for sometime in the first half of 2010.

Despite announcing just last week at NewTeeVee Live that it was still working with a consumer electronics partner on creating the so-called Boxee Box, our source says that the company will have it ready for demos at the industry trade show in early January.

The onus isn’t exactly on Boxee to deliver it — it’ll be up to an unnamed CE partner to build and manufacture the set-top box, for which Boxee is just providing the software. Even so, the kind of turnaround with which Boxee is expected to go to market is practically unheard of in the CE industry, and suggests that the company has been working on this project for an especially long time.

Boxee wouldn’t comment for this article, but promised more details and a timeline for deployment at its Dec. 7 event in New York. There, the company is expected to have mockups of the device, as well as more info about its features and maybe even final pricing details. CEO Avner Ronen told NewTeeVee that he hopes to price the box for less than $200, but given the cost of hardware involved, Boxee probably won’t be able to reach the $100 price point that Roku has for its IP video set-top box.

Also at the event, the company will be showing off the beta version of its media center, giving users a preview of the software before it’s officially released in January.

The online video revolution will be televised, meaning that it will soon show up on TVs, Blu-ray players and other connected devices, a panel of execs agreed at the Future of Television event in New York on Thursday. But the content that’s available on those devices could affect how much consumers think they’re worth. As Shawn DuBravac, chief economist for the Consumer Electronics Association, put it, “Consumers will pay more money for a connected TV if it has premium video content.”

At the same time, there are some limitations to connected devices. In the short term, most of them carry the same content — Netflix, Amazon video-on-demand, YouTube, Pandora, etc. Zach Klein, chief creative officer for Boxee, said that’s because only so many content partners are willing to work with companies like his to distribute online video to devices.

Another issue is that there’s no good way to navigate through that content. “The second [consumers] connect their TVs to the Internet, they’re overwhelmed by choice,” CEA’s DuBravac said. “The next bit of innovation will be in how to organize that information.”

Even so, the availability of content on connected devices should drive more consumers to adopt services, panelists said. According to Kurt Scherf, vice president and principal analyst at Parks Associates, the consumer electronics industry is expected to ship about 200 million connected devices worldwide by 2013. For a market that’s still in its infancy, that might seem like a drastic jump in just a few years — but Scherf said the consumer electronics manufacturers he talks to actually believe that estimate is too conservative.

DuBravac said those numbers jibe with his organization’s research. The CEA, which tracks shipments of CE devices, estimates that about 60 percent of all televisions sold in 2013 will have a broadband connection.

All those connected devices will drive some serious transactional revenues for over-the-top media, to the tune of about $3.4 billion by 2013, Scherf said. But in the grand scheme of things, the amount of money to be made off of IP video is still just a fraction of traditional pay-TV services. To put things in context, Scherf said that together, pay-TV and video-on-demand sales will total between $11 billion and $12 billion by that time.

I have plenty of questions about the new Sungale Cyberus ID700WTA portable media player. Why does this device have so much trouble connecting to my wireless network? Why do my video clips continually skip and stutter when I’m playing them back? Why is the touchscreen so hard to use?

But most of all, why would anyone pay $279 for this device?

On paper, the Cyberus ID700WTA “Smart Info Engine” sounds great. It’s a portable media player/e-book reader with a big 7-inch color touchscreen. It plays back photos and videos, as well as audio tracks in a variety of formats such as AVI, MPEG4, DVIX, XVID, WMA, JPG, BMP, TIFF and PNG. It has wireless Internet access, and allows you to watch video from YouTube, listen to IP radio, check weather, get news updates and driving directions, check your Gmail, and look at photos from Picasa.

And the device looks good out of the box. It comes wrapped in a handy leather case (my test unit came in a black case, but brown and white also are available) and is light and comfortable to hold. It comes with an AC charger for powering up, and Sungale says it will offer three to four hours of battery life once fully charged.

The Smart Info Engine also comes with a mini USB cord for connecting to your PC. Once I made the connection, though, I started to notice the device’s flaws. One of its biggest drawbacks is its included software, called File Converter, for transferring content over to the player. The app’s interface is downright ugly, which would be acceptable if the app were usable, but it’s not.

The File Converter software should, conceivably, convert files to the right format for you. I’m not just going on the name alone here: The software has a button that says “Convert.” But each time I pressed it, nothing happened — until the software froze on me. I thought I might have better luck with the app’s other option: “AddFile.” And I did, to an extent — it added my content to the list, eventually. But it was incredibly slow to respond, and several times the app just froze up on me. Each time, I had to force-quit the application, and finally resorted to transferring content over using Windows Explorer.

Once I managed to get the content on the Smart Info Engine, I was hoping things would go a little more smoothly. I was wrong. When you turn on the device, you’re presented with two options: Link to Internet or Go to Main Menu. I attempted to connect to my home wireless network, which is protected with a WEP password. But the Smart Info Engine wouldn’t connect — it kept giving me an error message. I was able to connect to my neighbor’s unsecured Wi-Fi network without a problem, though. (And, yes: I double-, triple-, and quadruple-checked that I was entering the correct password.) Sungale provided me with a firmware update for the device, but this did not correct the problem. It said the issue was likely due to a flaw with my home network setup, but I have since been able to connect multiple other devices with no problem.

Once connected, you’re instructed to proceed to the main menu, which is a bit, well, basic looking. It features small square icons for the various features of the device — almost in the style of an iPhone. But the design lacks the finesse of an iPhone, even though the 7-inch, 480×800 pixel screen should be up to the task.

You tap on the icons to access various features, like YouTube or Gmail, but the touchscreen is not nearly as responsive as I would like. Prepare to push hard. The Smart Info Engine also lacks a stylus, which would have been helpful, as some of the text you have to tap is small, particularly when you’re using an onscreen keyboard.

Once you access YouTube, you can browse available videos in categories like Top Rated and Top Favorites Today. You can access your own YouTube account, but I couldn’t find any way to search the site. And you’re not actually seeing the YouTube site; you’re seeing a list of videos reformatted for viewing on this device. Once I played back videos, though, most looked surprisingly good. I noticed some occasional stuttering, but nothing terrible.

I wish I could say the same about watching the videos I had actually stored on the device. I transferred a couple of titles to the device itself and loaded some videos on an SD card that I inserted into the available slot. Finding the content was a breeze, but when I played it back, it looked awful. My video constantly skipped, and often was too pixilated to be viewed at all. And despite the fact that the Smart Info Engine has a big 7-inch screen, video plays back in a smaller window that looks to be about 3.5 inches diagonally. Why not just use the whole screen?

That’s yet another question about this device, but the answer seems to be: just don’t buy it.

UPDATED: The next iteration of Flip video cameras will reportedly be WiFi-enabled, allowing users to wirelessly upload their videos. Pocket Lint first broke the news, and CrunchGear claims to have confirmed it. This next-gen Flip will also reportedly have a slide-out screen that reveals the record and menu buttons underneath — the screen will not, however, be a touchscreen. Update: We had a chance to speak with a few Cisco/Flip reps this morning who said they had not confirmed this news and would not comment on any upcoming products.

The addition of Wi-Fi will would be a nice touch for the video camera, and an appropriate marriage with parent company Cisco’s networking tech. (Perhaps the Wi-Fi will even tie into the mysterious forthcoming Flip set-top box.) But the bigger question plaguing the entire Flip line is just how much life is left in a standalone product. Decent video-recording capabilities are being embedded in phones like the Droid, iPhone and iPod Nano. As we learned earlier this year, the video quality of the Nano doesn’t quite match up to the Flip cam yet, but that’s a big yet. Will people want to carry around a dedicated video camera when their phone will do just fine for capturing spontaneous moments?

When we’ve spoken with Flip reps in the past they’ve put on a brave face and said that there is enough room for lots of players in the space, but it’s hard to believe that. With multipurpose devices getting better at shooting video and the high-end HD cameras dropping in price, the better-than-good-but-not-great Flips are getting squeezed out.

The California Energy Commission just approved measures to ensure new televisions are energy efficient. The proposed standards have been a point of contention with the consumer electronics industry and Hollywood, and a decision had been delayed after extended comments from the Consumer Electronics Association.

The standards will apply only to new televisions sold in California starting in January 2011. Further, they are only for TVs 58 inches or smaller. TV makers, with the exception of Vizio, had opposed the measure on the grounds that they expect to make their TVs greener on a voluntary basis, and the regulation is overkill.

California also thinks that TVs are more of an energy suck than TV makers do; the CEC estimates they account for 10 percent of household power use while TV makers say it’s closer to 5 percent. The CEC says the measure will save 3,831 gigawatt hours (GWh) in 2011, at a cost reduction of between $18 and $30 per year, per television.

Sony’s PlayStation 3 seems to be continually a day late and a dollar short compared with Microsoft’s Xbox. As we learned at NewTeeVee Live last week, today is the day that social features like Facebook and Twitter integration landed on Xbox LIVE. And the PS3? Well, in a corporate blog post yesterday [via PC World], Sony announced that it too is getting Facebook and Twitter. Kinda. From that post:

The latest update incorporates Facebook into the PS3 experience. By linking your PlayStation Network account to your Facebook account, you will have the option for the PS3 to automatically update your Facebook News Feed with Trophy and PlayStation Store activity. This update also enables developers to set specific criteria in their titles to publish additional game information to your News Feed. You can then check out your updates, and those of your friends, on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media favorites through the PS3’s built-in web browser.

Like the PS3’s Netflix solution, which requires a disc to be played in order to connect to the Netflix streaming, Sony’s foray into social media doesn’t seem fully baked. While I’m still unsure about the current role of social media on game consoles, at least Microsoft included Facebook photo sharing on the TV and created a slick user interface for Twitter.

Sony’s social update will be here “soon.”

Chipmaker Amimon today announced the availability of its WHDI modules that can be used in both note-and-netbook PCs. WHDI-enabled PCs will be able to wirelessly transmit uncompressed 1080p/60GHz HD content to television sets with the WHDI chipsets. According to Amimon, together, the new solution enables users to view all of the content on their notebook on their TVs including web video, flash media, photos and PC games.

Of course, this blissful wireless pairing is heavily dependent on having a WHDI-based TV (though Amimon says that the new modules will work with non-WHDI TVs through an HDMI adapter). WHDI is one of many standards including Wireless HD, WiFi and WiGig that are all competing to be the dominant wireless HD standard.

Amimon has raised $50 million in funding to date and says that notebooks with the new WHDI modules will be in the market in 2010.

Color us surprised. Not only is would-be cable killer Sezmi not dead, the company announced today that it has received $25 million in new funding from existing investors and it has launched a pilot program in Los Angeles.

Sezmi’s two-part set-top box solution consists of a receiver that receives over-the-air transmissions (Sezmi leases spectrum to broadcast content) and a 1TB DVR that stores shows and aggregates broadband content.

To get Sezmi, customers will either rent the equipment for an undisclosed amount, or purchase the equipment outright for $299. Ongoing service fees are $5 a month for broadcast-only channels or $25 a month for a broadcast/cable combo. As the service expands, it is supposed to be available through retail channels and through small and medium telcos and ISPs.

While Sezmi has pulled together a lineup of cable channels including Bravo, CNN, MTV, TBS and more — it still lacks any channels from FOX or Disney, including ESPN, severely hobbling its content selection.

The LA Times points out that the company is being a bit cagey about the HD it will offer. Sezmi didn’t say how much HD content it will deliver and told the paper, “The most popular content on the most popular networks will be in HD as available.”

With the influx of new capital, Sezmi has raised $71 million by our count. But the company will need the cash to establish and explain itself to the market. We still think its solution is too complex for most people (even though it’s not that complex) to grasp quickly, which could turn potential customers off.

If you live in L.A. and want to try out Sezmi for yourself, you can sign up here. Let us know how it goes.

Not to pat ourselves on the back, but you know how we know yesterday’s NewTeeVee Live conference was awesome? We’re not exhausted. Typically after an all-day show packed with interviews, on-stage moderating, and shaking hands, you’re pretty wiped out.

But the energy was so great yesterday that we’re just pumped for the year ahead. If you weren’t able to attend, you should check out the video from the day (thanks, Livestream!), but if you’re looking for something faster, here’s a recap of what we learned:

Fireside chats = awesome
We went out on a limb yesterday and built our day around one-on-one chats and short presentations and only had one panel. The result was the ability to have deeper conversations and extract real news from our guests.

Take Comcast’s TV Everywhere To Go
Comcast Interactive president Amy Banse is a charmer who could sell ice to the Eskimos. Talking with her, you literally start thinking “Hey, Comcast isn’t so bad… maybe I should get that triple play package.” While she’s a cagey one, Banse did provide us tasty TV Everywhere nuggets:

• First, it sounds like Comcast’s On Demand Online will be available “by Hanukkah” (which starts Dec. 11).
• You’ll need to download the Move player along with an authentication app, and you can authorize up to three devices in the home.
• Also, contrary to earlier reports — Comcast subscribers will be able to access their On Demand Online content outside the home. So you can fire up your laptop while traveling to catch up on content you may have missed.

YouTube Goes 1080p
If there’s any one thing to show you how far video technology has come, during the first NewTeeVee Live in 2007, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen dismissed HD and said his company wanted to provide video quality that was “good enough.” Fast forward to 2009, now YouTube is playing 1080p video as announced by head of product Hunter Walk during an on-stage interview. This comes less than a year after YouTube switched on HD, and will apply to the site’s whole library of previous uploads of 1080p-quality videos. Walk said about 10 percent of YouTube videos are uploaded in some form of HD, though the percent of views for such videos may be smaller given many people are better served with a smooth lower-quality stream.

Redbox Sees Beyond DVDs
The controversial DVD kiosk company recognizes the DVD won’t be around forever and has already started testing direct digital downloads in some kiosks.

Xbox LIVE Gets Social Next Week
Creating social TV experiences is a big emphasis for Microsoft and Facebook and Twitter will be landing on the platform on Nov. 17.

Boxee Knows How to Get Press
Making the prediction that in five years there will be more Apple subscribers than Comcast subscribers while at a conference where Comcast is speaking is an easy way to grab headlines. Regardless, Boxee still has tongues wagging and that will only increase when it unveils its upcoming mystery box.

Roku is Becoming a Platform (But Still Likes the Hardware Biz)
The company’s Channel Store will be launching imminently, enabling just about anyone to create a channel for the box (and the TV, by extension). But while the company is building a flexible and potentially powerful TV-connected platform, Roku still likes being in the (tough) hardware business and will keep making boxes.

Video Helping PBS Get Hip
PBS is now drawing 26-minute sessions to its video portal, and will soon introduce a version of its site that automatically syndicates local stations’ content.

Adobe Pooh-Poohs Open Video
CTO Kevin Lynch said HTML 5 is trying to do what Flash already does today.

CNN Refocuses Web Video Effort Around Live Events
The network sees more promise in its social TV efforts with Facebook than in linear newscasts, and talked up the live event coverage on the same day it laid off its web news anchors.

VIZIO is the New Fred
Last year, crowds flocked around young YouTube star, Fred. This year it was Matt McRae of Vizio. The head of platforms (i.e. widgets) for the country’s No. 1 TV manufacturer was mobbed after his chat and had to pass through a gauntlet of eager developers looking for a home for their apps.

Thanks to all of our speakers, the rest of the GigaOM Family who furiously liveblogged our talks (newbie Ryan Lawler had a baptism by fire this week!), all of our sponsors and all of you who came out, including a sell-out crowd of 600 to the venue and 12,000 more uniques via the live video stream. See you at NewTeeVee Live 2010!

Dish Network has filed for trademark protection of “TV Everywhere,” as the satellite company is evidently looking to use the term for its upcoming Slingbox-enabled set-top box, reports Multichannel News.

“TV Everywhere” has become the industry’s go-to term for describing multi-service operators’ plans to make more premium TV content accessible online to those with a pay TV subscription. Though individual companies will have their own branded flavor of TV Everywhere, the moniker has become a catch-all.

When the broader industry uses the term “TV Everywhere” it describes a relationship between the multi-service operator and its programming partners to deliver content across multiple screens. In Dish’s case, it’s Sling-enabled set-top boxes allow people to placeshift their live or DVRd content.

Last month, EchoStar, which sells hardware and satellite services, started pitching its Sling-based set-top solution to cable companies. According to EchoStar, the placeshifting technology would give MSO subscribers TV Everywhere without the MSO needing to get into all of those agreements with the programmers.

Dish filed for the TV Everywhere trademark with the USPTO on Sept. 17, and the filing covers “television transmission services” and “providing access to electronic sites for remote access, recording, and viewing of television programming via personal computers, mobile phones, personal digital assistants, and laptop computers.”

Trademark or no, we’re still going to use the term “TV Everywhere” a lot at this week’s NewTeeVee Live conference.

After being acquired for a song by Arris in Sept., Digeo released the latest in a string of improvements to its product portfolio today, starting with an HD DVR that can stream live or recorded video to up to three rooms in a user’s home.

In the latest update to the Moxi brand of products, Digeo added a new three-tuner HD DVR, which will allow consumers to record up to three programs at once, while having the ability to watch a fourth recorded program. Or, when combined with the company’s Moxi Mate products, users can now watch up to three live or recorded shows from different rooms in the house.

The ability to stream live programming to the Moxi Mate is also a new addition, correcting one of the biggest things missing from the product. Prior to the latest release, users could only watch pre-recorded programs through their Moxi Mates.

With the addition of new products and functionality, Digeo is lowering the price of its two-tuner Moxi HD DVR to $499, from its previous $799 price point. The company also reduced the cost of the Moxi Mate digital video player from $399 to $299.

However, the three-tuner HD DVR can only be purchased as part of a two-room or three-room bundle. For $799, consumers can purchase a three-tuner Moxi HD DVR and a Moxi Mate that will extend live or recorded programming to a second room in the house. Or they can spend $999 for a three-tuner HD DVR and two Moxi Mates.

This is the third update that Digeo has announced for the product line this year, after adding support for Internet video from sites like Hulu and YouTube in the spring, and announcing the availability of multiroom DVR viewing with the Moxi Mate line over the summer.

Have you ever wondered what goes on at your house when you’re not home? Thanks to Avaak’s Vue personal video network, it’s now easy to find out. This $299 kit features wireless video cameras that you can set up almost anywhere and view over the Internet. It’s incredibly easy to use, and the hardware is well-designed.

Avaak says the system is designed for a variety of uses, including keeping an eye on pets or elderly parents; monitoring vacation homes; checking in on latchkey kids; securing a small business; and more. And it’s so easy to set up that anyone can use it. Unfortunately, the web-based surveillance tools are too limited to be a truly useful remote security system; at this point you can only watch live video, though the company says it plans to add recording scheduling soon.

The kit includes two tiny wireless cameras and a wireless gateway that connects to your router. You just turn the battery-powered cameras on, press a button to pair them with the gateway, and you’re good to go. The four included magnetic mounts are so well-designed — they’re the shape of a ball, cut in half — they impressed me with their simplicity. They grab the camera and hold it securely; it really couldn’t be easier.

Once the cameras are in place, you can log onto my.vuezone.com and create an account, with an identification number from your wireless gateway. Once you’ve created a user name and password, you can access your cameras from any browser that supports Flash. (That means you can’t use the iPhone’s Safari browser, but the company says an iPhone app is coming soon.)

The Vuezone’s Web interface is neatly laid out: Your cameras appear in a window on the left side of the screen, and you can drag them to the main window to play their video feed. The video quality is decent, but varies greatly depending on the lighting in the room. (And these cameras have no microphones, so the feed is video only.) You can change the settings to accommodate for low, normal or bright light, and to a certain extent, this helps. I used the “low light” setting in a room with a dim lamp, and the video appeared nice and bright. But when I tried to use the camera in a darker room, lit only by a nightlight, the video was so dark it was difficult to see — even on the low light setting. This is too bad, because this camera could really appeal to parents who want to see what their little ones are doing in their bedrooms when they’re supposed to be sleeping.

That’s not the only limitation of the Vue network. While the system comes with two cameras — and supports up to 50 (additional cameras are available for $99 each) — you can only see one feed at a time. You can drag all of your cameras into the main window, but only one will play at a time — if you have one camera playing, it will stop automatically if you start another one.

Another limitation: You can only watch live video. You can’t see what happened while you were away — so if someone broke into your house, robbed you, but put everything back in place, you might never even know that they’d been there. You can’t schedule video to record while you’re away from your computer, though Avaak says the feature is coming soon — and it will be a most welcome addition. (You can record video as you’re watching it, but I’m not sure why you’d want to.) And the Vue cameras don’t have any kind of motion detector that would cause them to turn on when something happens in the room, but the company says it is considering adding this to future versions. Scheduled recordings and motion detection would greatly increase the appeal of this product to people looking for a home or small business security system.

Avaak is off to a good start with the Vue personal network; it’s incredibly easy to use. Once the company adds the ability to schedule recordings, it will be far more useful, and able to compete with similar systems, like Logitech’s Indoor Video Security Master System. Until it has those features, though, its appeal is limited.

That beautiful 1080p picture you’re enjoying? Well, you may as well just chuck it in the garbage, because Ultra High Definition is coming. Research firm In-Stat put out a report today saying that while it will take some time before the UHD market hits a critical mass of 5 percent household penetration, over the next five to 10 years, companies in the TV ecosystem will be able to experiment with business strategies to turn UHD into a strong business for the long haul.

UHD offers 16 times the resolution of Blu-ray along with 22.2 multichannel three-dimensional sound. Current proposals for UHD have the technology coming in two flavors: 7680 x 4320 pixels (8k resolution) and 3840 x 2160 pixels (4k resolution).

Based on its research, In-Stat predicts that broadcasters will begin offering UHD content to an addressable market of UHDTVs between 2017 and 2022. UHDTVs will approach 5 percent of European homes until 2021 and will then shoot up to 28.2 percent by 2025.

Many of you might have already been planning to dump your 2-D TVs when 3-D sets hit the market. Michelle Abraham, principal analyst for In-Stat, said during a brief phone chat that they expect 3-D TVs to hit the market first, but the 3-D peanut butter will get into the Ultra HD chocolate as the desire to create a more immersive experience will mean that UHDTVs will incorporate both 2-D and 3-D technology. And then your mind will be officially blown.

Motorola Looks to Unify 3-D TV Experience; company talks up set-top boxes that could convert 3-D TV video into any 3-D format. (Multichannel News)

CE Manufacturer Earnings; Sony got roughed up with a net loss of 26.3 billion yen ($289 million) as opposed to a 20.8 billion yen ($228 million) profit for the same quarter last year. (Variety) Samsung, on the other hand, posted its best quarterly net profit ever, with 3.72 trillion won ($3.14 billion). (The New York Times)

CableLabs Wants Standards for TV Everywhere; R&D consortium issues request for information to define elements for a common technical approach to authentication plans. (Multichannel News)

comScore Laying Off 8 Percent of Workforce; measurement firm shifting resources to support Media Metrix 360. (paidContent)

Animoto Partners with LIFE.com; users can incorporate more than 100 images into their videos including photos of Marilyn Monroe and and the first lunar landing. (emailed release)

Flip video cameras are known for being stupidly simple, but the product’s migration to the big screen looks to be a pretty complicated affair, if what Dave Zatz is reporting is true. Flipping through FCC product announcements, Zatz found a “FlipShare TV” product manual.

From the looks of it, the set-up has three components: a box you plug into your TV, a remote control and a USB stick. Plug the USB stick into your computer and the box into your TV (via composite or HDMI) and wirelessly stream recorded video to your television. No other details, such as a ship date or pricing, were included. When we contacted Cisco for comment, a rep emailed us with:

We do not comment on alleged products coming to market. As with all our products, we will announce through proper disclosure channels when products are ready and available to our customers.

Granted, we know next to nothing about this supposed box, but it seems clumsy for the usually elegant Flip line. And while this product appears to be targeting families that want to share video easily and may not want to upload it to the Internet, do people really want yet another box under their TV for the sole purpose of watching home movies? Plus any simplicity you gain from not uploading is essentially lost when you have to use two separate devices. It would be cool to see Flip develop its own Roku channel and eliminate the extra set-top hardware. We’ll see if a formal announcement comes in time for the holiday season.

Apple released a software update for its Apple TV set-top box today offering a redesigned interface and support for iTunes LP and iTunes Extras on big screen TVs.

From the press release:

The redesigned main menu on Apple TV gives you instant access to your favorite content. Recently rented or purchased movies, as well as other content including TV shows, music, podcasts, photos and YouTube, are accessible directly from the new main menu.

Along with these nice new visuals, the update also lets users access Internet radio stations through their TVs, and some photo viewing enhancements, including the addition of iPhoto Faces, which uses facial recognition to organize photos. For more on the update, visit our sister site, TheAppleBlog.

An interface refresh is fine and all, but Apple will need to do something much more bold to set itself apart from the highly competitive over-the-top video space. The OTT on-demand rental market will hit $2.1 billion by 2014, and Apple hasn’t been innovating along with its competitors in the TV space. Television manufacturers are baking all kinds of widget functionality directly into the TV, the Roku is expanding its channel partners, and Netflix is getting on every TV-connected device under the sun…except for the Apple TV.

Of course, maybe Apple is bypassing the whole set-top thing entirely by turning its iMacs into TVs.