Lis­ten­ing to Eng­ad­ged Pod­cast 47.5 and the dis­cus­sion about the stra­tegy Apple is fol­lo­wing with video on both the iPod and the iMac, I am slightly sur­pri­sed about some of the theo­ries not articulated.

If you are a com­pany that is highly iden­ti­fied with digi­tal media, that – even with a cer­tain under­state­ment – is con­stantly on the tech­ni­cal edge, would you really want to inte­grate a dying tech­no­logy like ana­log TV into where you deve­lop your media hub? I see Apple as a com­pany that rather takes its time and invests effort into doing things both right and in style. Ana­log TV wouldn’t make the new iMacs dis­play look good.

To me, Front Row has HDTV writ­ten all over it. With Video in the iTu­nes Store, Apple even alre­ady is lay­ing the ground­work to have HDTV trans­port in their hands and put some pres­sure on cable ope­ra­tors and broad­cas­ters. They have a dis­play more sui­ted to 16:9 mate­rial than 4:3 TV. And of course, they can do all the won­der­ful things with the digi­tal media that the iTools and Front Row allow.

I’m not at all sur­pri­sed that there’s no TV in the mix … yet.