《华尔街日报》（Wall Street Journal）本周一发表了一篇文章，说的是苹果（Apple）对电视业务领域发起猛攻。文章字里行间似乎可以听到媒体高管们绝望的哀嚎，他们祈求苹果透露一点口风，告诉他们苹果的电脑奇才们到底想干什么。

    这些媒体高管中大概也包括鲁珀特•默多克，《华尔街日报》即归其新闻集团（News Corp）所有。美国现有的电视业务每年仅靠广告和每月有线电视订阅费就能获得1,500亿美元收入。据报道，这些高管们担心这笔钱或将不保。

    他们确实应该担心。他们垄断了有线定价，同时通过神憎鬼厌的广告从观众身上牟利。如今，时机已经成熟，这个行业也该被互联网技术瓦解了，就像十年前音乐业务被掏空一样。这里有一个很好的例子：上周日晚，Showtime的2,000万付费用户收看了《国土》（Homeland）本季大结局，三个小时后，该剧的数字版本就出现在了BitTorrent上，供网友下载观看。BitTorrent是一个点对点文件共享协议，全球数亿观众通过该协议，电脑上观看电视上最流行的节目，不用掏钱，而且不用看广告。

    难怪默多克这些大亨们无不渴望知道，乔布斯对其自传作者所说的“终于搞定了”电视问题到底是指什么。乔布斯对电视产业究竟有何打算？会像他对音乐产业所做的那样吗？（先不论后果究竟是好是坏。）

    我们普遍认为苹果正在致力于开发一款近乎完美的电视，不过《华尔街日报》周一的报道却丝毫没提到这点。实际上，该报道只是引用了一位接近媒体高管人士的言论，这位匿名人士指出苹果正在讨论的新服务“很可能完全依托于苹果的现有技术，其中就包括苹果的电视机顶盒。”（黑体着重强调部分是笔者添加的）

    一如既往，这让我们想起贺拉斯•德迪欧对当前形势的精辟分析。一周前，他在博客上发表了一篇文章，名为《隐藏在我们眼皮底下的秘密》（Hiding in plain sight）。德迪欧指出，几乎所有苹果最具颠覆性的产品，无不来自于对现有产品、技术或平台的不断改进。例如：

    • iPad是iPod touch的改进版

    • iPod touch是对iPhone的改进

    • iPhone使用了Mac平台的OS X操作系统和Objective C编程语言

    • OS X系统则源自NeXT

    • 苹果应用程序商店的商业模型来自iTunes商店

    • iTunes商店来自iTunes，后者最开始被用作Mac平台的iPod同步工具

    • 不一而足

    再加上（史蒂夫•乔布斯本人去年提醒苹果100名高级管理人员的）那个事实：制造电视机是一项利润低、周转慢的业务，德迪欧因此总结道，大家纷纷猜测的苹果电视其实就是苹果公司已经在销售的苹果电视机顶盒。用他的话说：

    “（苹果电视）盛名之下，其实难符。巴不得避人耳目。它显然没能取得成功，因此反而得以在人们眼皮底下隐藏其秘密。”

    译者：项航

    Reading between the lines of the Wall Street Journal's story Monday about Apple's "assault" on the TV business, you can almost hear the desperation of the media executives who asked Apple (AAPL) to brief them on exactly what the wizards of Cupertino are up to.

    These media executive -- which included, presumably, Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. (NWS) owns the Journal -- are reported to be worried about what's going to happen to the $150 billion a year that the existing TV business generates in the U.S. alone from advertising and monthly cable TV subscriptions.

    They should be worried. That pipeline of cash -- extracted from viewers through monopoly cable pricing and intrusive ads that nobody wants to watch -- is ripe for disruption by the same technology that hollowed out the music business a decade earlier. Case in point: Three hours after the season finale of Homeland was piped to Showtime's 20 million paying customers Sunday night, digital copies of the show were available for downloading or streaming through BitTorrent, the peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol by which hundreds of millions of viewers around the world watch TV's most popular shows -- free and free of ads -- on their computers.

    No wonder the Murdochs of the world want to know what Steve Jobs had in mind when he told his biographer that he had "finally cracked" the TV problem. Could he have been preparing to do for the TV conglomerates what he did -- for good or ill -- to the music labels?

    Conventional wisdom has it that Apple is working on a full-blown TV set, but there's nothing in Monday's Journal story that actually says that. In fact, the story quotes one unnamed source familiar with the media executives' briefings who said that the types of new services Apple is discussing "could be done with Apple's existing technologies, which include its Apple TV set-top box." (emphasis ours)

    Which brings us, as it often does, to Horace Dediu's analysis of the situation. In a post published a week ago entitled "Hiding in plain sight," he pointed out that nearly all of Apple's most disruptive products have been sustaining improvements on existing products, technologies or platforms. For example:

    • The iPad is an evolution of the iPod touch

    • The iPod touch is an evolution of the iPhone

    • The iPhone uses OS X and Objective C from the Mac

    • OS X came from NeXT

    • The app store market model came out of the iTunes store

    • The iTunes store came from iTunes which came first to the Mac as a media sync tool for the iPod

    • etc.

    This, and the fact (as Steve Jobs himself reminded his 100 top staffers last year) that making TV sets is a low-margin, slow-turnover business, leads Dediu to conclude that the Apple TV that everybody is speculating about is the Apple TV the company is already selling. In his words:

    "A wonderfully asymmetric product begging to be ignored. A product that because of its apparent lack of success, effectively hides all its secrets in plain sight."