Digital Home Thoughts: Apple & Google Teaming Up for Streaming Video?

"TechCrunch has a post out saying that Google is reportedly in talks with Apple to allow Google Video to work with the new iTV widgety thing that I've decided to call the iDongle. You remember the iDongle of course -- that little gadgety thing that Apple thinks they will be selling for $300 next year. I previously wrote about the $300 iDongle here suggesting that someone needed to check Steve Job's pipe because he's probably pretty high if he thinks people are going to pay $300 to have the privilege of buying less than DVD quality movies at $10-$15 each when you can get a monthly subscription to Netflix for far less than the cost of two movies a month from Apple."

This post from Thomas Hawk is a couple of weeks old, but it's an interesting viewpoint from someone who most definitely isn't under the influence of a reality distortion field. I agree with Hawk about the poor quality of Google Video - it's really complete crap, just like YouTube, and I can't fathom watching something that bad on my big screen TV. Audio is one thing - a lot of people probably couldn't tell the difference between a 64 kbps audio file and a 128 kbps audio file, but poor-quality video is easy to spot.