These days, everyone seems to point as the Internet as the future distribution conduit for television. In fact, this has been the story for a little over 5 years now. While technically, it is feasible, the issue holding everything is the lack of a lucrative business model that can challenge the magnitude of revenue from network television on cable. So far, it had been little more than an incremental blip; A revenue that is nice to have but too minuscule to stand on it’s own.

Apple has been trying to establish itself in the video distribution using the same recipe as it did for music. The buy and download music has been a huge success, so much as it is on the verge of overtaking the CD as the dominant form of distribution. This make sense for music; it’s easy to listen to music while doing something else AND people typically listen to music they like many many times. For TV shows? Not so much. You want to play it right away, not in 30 minutes, you want to pay as little as possible especially since you typically will not watch it 20 or 30 times.

So it the “rental” watch it now a model that is going to work better? That’s what Apple believes and they want to make it easy to enroll ten of thousands of enthusiast in the market research which it call the “NEW Apple TV”.

And if it works, if people like it then what?

Then they do prepare an awesome consumer electronic device based on that concept an Apple branded TV set that is fully integrated, upgradable and leave the competition trying to catch up. Also, anyone things that the new social media feature of iTunes will not be applied to the TV content soon?. Apple wants to become the new Sony, it is for music, it now things they found the formula for TV.

Who want to join this market research?