In his weekly column Robert X. Cringely brings up an idea worth considering. Currently Apple has a device called the AirPort Express. This is an interesting device in that it streams music from a computer running iTunes wirelessly. More interesting to me is the fact that it has an optical out which is still a rarity in consumer electronics even in this day of digital audio.
The idea that Cringley puts forth is that Apple will have a follow-up device that will do video. It would in theory stream new Quicktime 7 H.264 content at resolutions up to HD quality. This would go along with a new movie download system to work within the existing iTunes store infrastructure. This can be seen to a degree already with iTunes now selling music videos, it isn't that much of a leap to full length HD movies.
The hardware to enable this isn't that far fetched either. Take the existing AirPort Express and integrate a new H.264 and MPEG-2 decoding chip. Broadcom has one available already and it will probably be the basis of the new DirecTV receivers this fall. Add an HDMI connector and it is done. Now you have a mini Media Center extender. Sure it is not as fully featured as current Media Center extenders or an Xbox extender, but it fits in the palm of your hand and would cost about $100. The only concern I have with this is bandwidth needed, streaming HD quality video even at H.264 compression levels is a whole lot different than streaming audio, close to 100 times the bandwidth. It is questionable if 802.11g can support this level. The current AirPort Express has a wired ethernet port and it can be assumed the new one would as well. 100 Mbps or even 1 Gbps ethernet would be more than sufficient for HD streams or even multiple. The computer acting as host for this wouldn't need much other than a broadband connection and a lot of disk space since it won't actually be doing any decoding itself.
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