The Apple TV "replaces" iTV

Ladies and gentlemen, it happened! The Macworld Conference & Expo opened its gates, Steve Jobs' keynote is now a part of the IT history, and we have a lot of interesting news flying around, just waiting to be picked. One of the most interesting of these - leaving aside the iPhone and the new name of the company (no worries, you'll find out about those later) - is about the device formerly known as iTV. We had a lot of rumors about it, but now we finally got some facts, and everything came from Steve Jobs himself, as everyone was expecting...

During his Macworld keynote, Steve Jobs revealed to the world a brand new device from Apple, called Apple TV, by saying that "Apple TV is like a DVD player for the 21st century-you connect it to your entertainment system just like a DVD player, but it plays digital content you get from the Internet rather than DVDs you get from a physical store." Then, he continued by saying that "Apple TV plays the same iTunes content that users enjoy on their computers and iPods, so now they can even watch part of a movie in their living room, and watch the rest later on their iPod."

Pretty interesting, don't you think? I bet you do, since being able to wirelessly play your favorite iTunes content from your Mac or PC on your widescreen TV, including podcasts, photos, TV shows, music and, of course, movies is really great. Using the Apple Remote, you can easily take advantage of the Apple TV's on screen interface to browse and view your media collection.

The Apple TV features a 40GB hard drive that can store up to 9,000 songs, 50 hours of video or 25,000 photos or a combination of these three, and integrates with iTunes to allow you to choose from over 250 movies and 350 TV shows, 4 million songs and more. Capable of delivering high-definition 720p output, the Apple TV comes with HDMI, component video, analog and optical audio ports as standard features. At last, you should know that this device can auto sync media from one computer or stream content from up to five additional computers right to your TB using wireless connections.

Everything really great so far, but I guess I forgot to answer the big "when" and "how much" questions, didn't I? All these will be available to the public shaped as the Apple TV starting in February, for a price of 299$.