Brightcove CEO sees a bright future for Apple television

Brightcove founder, chairman and CEO Jeremy Allaire previously shared some interesting observations regarding Apple’s living room strategy, saying that AirPlay technology and third-party apps will set a mythical Apple television set apart from traditional TV sets. And with Tim Cook telling NBC that television remains an “area of intense interest” for Apple.

Jeremy this morning shared some additional observations concerning the Apple TV strategy, noting Apple should best serve its customers with a companion $149 device rather than a full-blown HD TV set costing as much as two thousand bucks…

Jeremy Allaire, Founder, Chairman and CEO, Brightcove, writes in a post over at AllThingsD that a companion device could include a “coax dongle” in order to replace users’ existing cable set-top box:

A new companion device for TV that starts at $149, attaches to nearly any existing TV, and does not require customers to buy an expensive new monitor. This is crucial for quickly establishing and maintaining platform dominance quickly and even stand-alone could be a $5-10 billion opportunity.

This is what such a product – call it the Apple TV on steroids, if you will – might look like.

He thinks such a device should offer HDMI and digital audio output, a gigabit Ethernet port and built-in WiFi, plus two Lightning ports — one for power, another for the included coax dongle.

In addition to a standalone and inexpensive set-top box, Apple’s additional $30 billion+ revenue stream opportunity will come from some sexy television hardware:

A new family of ultra-thin TV monitors that bundles all of the capabilities of the companion device and includes beefed up computing power. These large-screen monitors will be a direct assault on the global TV monitor industry, a market worth hundreds of billions annually, albeit with slightly slower replacement cycles of four years versus two years for smartphones and tablets.

This is one of the possible designs for a standalone Apple television set.

The new Apple TV, he concludes, will include a seamless touch and TV-based interface making it simple to consume your existing cable and broadcast content plus any online video. The device will also be “the ultimate game console” because Apple’s living room platform should leave Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony running scared.

With a single launch, Apple will extend the iOS gaming distribution ecosystem into the living room and invent new categories of gaming through the interaction of iOS devices with Apple TV.

Plus, it’s gonna run third-party apps and the touch-TV combo will ignite a new era in dual-screen software design.

He certainly puts his money where his mouth is: Brightcove already released a software development kit that helps content owners create dual-screen apps which stream high-definition video to a television set through Apple’s set-top box and AirPlay protocol.

The article is a worthwhile read and it contains a bunch of mockups not included here, so hit AllThingsD for the full story.

What do you think of Jeremy’s predictions?