Apple Wants iCloud to Be the World's DVR

The Wall Street Journal has been revealing some details about Apple's plans in the television space. Steve Jobs famously said he thought he had "cracked" the problem of television shortly before he passed away last year, and everyone has been trying to figure out what he meant ever since.

The latest report from the WSJ, if true and I'm interpreting it correctly, likely reveals what Jobs thought was the breakthrough:

The Cupertino, Calif.-based company proposes giving viewers the ability to start any show at any time through a digital-video recorder that would store TV shows on the Internet. Viewers even could start a show minutes after it has begun.

The vision here is pure Apple. The company identified an area of complexity, in this case managing TV recordings, and plans to offer a simple solution where it simply does it for you. Here, iCloud becomes the world's DVR. There won't be boxes in every individual home making millions of individual recordings of the same programs; there will be one place that "records" the programs (Apple's datacenter) and all of the boxes will stream that copy.

You won't miss a show because you forgot to set up a recording; Apple is recording it for you. You won't miss a show because the DVR filled up; Apple is recording it for you. You won't miss a recording because you're out of free tuners, or because the cable went out, or because a cloud went between you and the satellite. Don't worry. Apple's recording it for you.

Obvious road blocks have to be overcome before this vision of the future can come to pass. For one, the WSJ reports that Apple doesn't have a single deal worked out yet with any content providers or cable providers to make this happen legally. For another, this setup requires a completely reliable Internet connection. If the Internet goes out, you not only have no TV anymore (not a guaranteed problem today) but you can't watch your recordings in the meantime either.

Plus, ISPs aren't going to be happy about a system like this because it would put an enormous strain on their networks. They are already playing around with bandwidth caps, and that's without most people getting their TV through the Internet. Perhaps the new H.265 standard will solve this particular issue, but it's not going to be available for anything until "as soon as 2013" (which probably means later than that, given the choice of weasel words here).

This sounds like a really cool way forward. I have my doubts that we'll see anything like it any time soon because content owners, cable providers, and ISPs are some of the worst companies in the world. Of course, Apple worked things out with cell operators, who are just as bad if not worse, so there is some hope out there.