I dunno, Jobs selling Pixar to Disney and sitting on Disney's board sounds like a partnership to me

I have Popcorn and a Turbo.264 - yes, there is an extra step to convert to h.264 but I get great space savings over all those other codecs, and once my content is in iTunes I can use it anywhere - Mac, PC, iPod, iPhone and AppleTV. With my new MacBook Pro and the Turbo.264, it converts just about in real time. I just drop content on Popcorn and then go to bed - in the morning it's in my iTunes library. I have every episode of Good Eats and several other TV shows converted from my Tivo - and now that I'm caught up, PopCorn downloads and converts from my Tivo automatically - I don't even have to do anything. Not a big deal, really. H.264 is simply a better codec, and more importantly it's an open standard (unlike Divix). Yeah, it's annoying that it's all the Apple supports for now - but relatively speaking, it's a small annoyance.

Also one shouldn't overlook that tight integration with iTunes - my mother purchase an AppleTV and I walked her through setting it up over the phone (basically just read the getting started thing to her while she did it). She would never download content over the Internet and couldn't care less about codec's like divix. She loves the fact that she can view her photo's on her TV while playing music - and it was as simple as her picking which photo's she wanted in iTunes and syncing them over. The integration is seamless - I wouldn't have recommended any other media server to her unless I was planing to be there for a visit to set it up. That seamless integration is what Apple is famous for - the entire end to end experience.

Anyway, as far as video goes, we are all on the cutting edge

Netflix will probably be the most significant enabler of video over the Internet - it's mainstream enough, and they are slapping players in enough hardware (my Tivo and Xbox both stream netflix, and BlueRay players and some TV's now stream directly!) to make it mainstream. You can hack the AppleTV (boxee) to do Netflix, Hulu and the others - I suspect at some point things will converge and Apple may support them directly too. But even if they don't, as it is my AppleTV is pretty darn useful (but I certainly wouldn't mind if they evolved it more). This whole space is still defining itself - should be an interesting next couple of years!

I figured out what "Popcorn" DocNo was referring to. He's referring to the Roxio Popcorn software available for the Mac platform which allows you to "Take your favorite TV shows on the go with TiVoToGo transfers".

I'm pretty sure the Mac folks are rather familiar with the product. More product info can be found here: http://www.roxio.com/enu/products/popco ... rview.html

This whole space is still defining itself - should be an interesting next couple of years!