Gene Munster has seen the future of television and it has an Apple (AAPL) logo on it.

In a note to clients Thursday, Piper Jaffray's senior analyst offered a scenario by which Apple would enter the cut-throat TV market by 2011 with an Apple-branded television set with digital video recording and home media functions (music, movies, games, interactive TV) built-in.

"Yes, TV hardware is a challenging business if you don't change the rules of the game," Munster writes, "but we see potential for Apple to offer best-in-class software and hardware and charge a premium."

The roadmap to Apple television (as opposed to Apple TV), as Munster sees it:

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"We just met with Apple executives at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, CA, including Peter Oppenheimer, Greg Joswiak, and Eddy Cue."

Thus begins a note to clients sent Thursday by Barclays Capital analyst Ben Reitzes. The note ends with Reitzes raising his Apple price target to $208 from $188 — one of the sparks that sent Apple (AAPL) shares up 1.88% to close at $168.42 for the day.

In between, Reitzes rattles off a list of new products he expects Apple to introduce in the months ahead. Although he insists the Apple execs he met didn't divulge any major secrets, Reitzes sounded pretty sure of himself. Among the coming attractions, as he sees them:

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Here's an interesting statistic about Boxee, the freeware media browser that makes it easy to find and watch Web video and streaming TV shows on a computer screen.

Of the 370,000 people who have downloaded the free Boxee client since it became available last June,

• 67% are running it on Macs
• 25% are running it on Apple TVs
• 4% are running it on Linux boxes
• 4% are running it on Windows PCs

This is not the way the world usually works. Developers as a rule will walk through the desert in their socks to get to an installed base, which generally means the 8 or 9 out of 10 computers in the world that run Microsoft (MSFT) Windows.

So we asked Avner Ronen, the Israeli-trained software engineer who founded Boxee, how it came to be that 92% of his users are running Apple (AAPL) products?

The reason stems from a decision he made two years ago, when his team first started developing Boxee.

"We were all switching to Macs as our personal computers," he says. "And we felt many of the early adopters were going there as well."

It helped that Apple's hardware was standardized across the product line, which made it a more attractive multimedia development platform than PCs running different versions of Windows and manufactured by a host of different companies. And there was one more little thing:

"The Mac Mini and laptops were coming with remotes at the time, which made them great media center platforms. We just thought it made sense to start with Mac and then move to the PC."

Although the Mac version is in its second alpha and headed for beta, Boxee still hasn't been officially released on the PC. A Windows alpha came out earlier this year, but only by private invitation. A public release isn't expected for another six or seven weeks.

Even so, Boxee has been getting a lot of attention lately, especially after it won a Best of the Best Award at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. It now offers content both from Web sources like Blip.TV, Joost, TED and Revision3 as well as TV shows from mainstream outlets like PBS, CBS, HBO, CNN, Comedy Central, WB, NBC and Fox.

Over the past six weeks Boxee has been engaged in a game of cat and mouse with Hulu, the joint venture of NBC (GE) and Fox (NWSA) that streams TV content from nearly 450 shows, including such hits as 30 Rock, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report. Hulu has twice tried to pull its content off Boxee — most recently this week — but Ronen's programmers keep finding clever ways to get it back on. See here and here.

In March, Ronan drew more attention to Boxee by engaging in a fierce and widely read debate with HDNet's Mark Cuban over the future of video entertainment. It was set off by a Cuban editorial entitled "Why Do Internet People Think That Content People Are Stupid?"

Last week, a Boxee press conference/meet-up in New York City drew a standing-room-only crowd of more than 700 people. Most of them were Mac users.

Boxee's love for Apple, by the way, isn't exactly reciprocated. Boxee came to the Apple TV as a hack that gives owners a way to get around the set-top box's restrictions and watch content that isn't available on the iTunes Store.

Tuesday's iPhone 3.0 special event drew the biggest headlines, but that wasn't the only Apple (AAPL) news that broke this week. The highlights:

HD movies on iTunes: On Thursday, the company announced that its collection of high definition movies, hitherto available only through the Apple TV set-top box, can now be purchased or rented on the iTunes Store for viewing on a Mac, PC or widescreen TV. Is this a sign that Apple is losing interest in its "hobby"? The pickings for now are slim — only nine of the "box office blockbusters" featured on iTunes' HD Movies page are currently available — and they're pricey. Apple will be charging $19.99 for Quantum of Solace in HD when it becomes available on March 24; as Business of Video notes, you can order the DVD from Amazon for $16.99.

Jim Cramer touts Apple: You would think that after his humiliation on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart — and the first TV broadcast of his advice about how to short Apple and foment FUD to drive it down — that Jim Cramer would just shut up about Apple. But you would be wrong. This time he's an Apple bull. "I'm not going to go against Apple," he declared on his Mad Money Lighting Round Thursday. "There are a thousand Steve Jobs over at Apple and they're delivering product after product."

Revenues plummet at Palm: As expected, Palm's (PALM) earnings took another drubbing in the quarterly results released Thursday. Revenue fell to $90.6 million from $312.1 million a year ago, in line with the warning the company issued two weeks ago, but far below the $155 million the Street had been expecting. The company is pinning its hopes on the Pre — Palm's answer to the iPhone — slighly delayed but still due out before the end of June. The earnings call transcript is available here.

The iPhones of summer: If we didn't already believe that Apple has some new handsets in the works, developers poking around the entrails of the iPhone 3.0 beta software have found fresh clues pointing to new iPhones, new iPod touches and two mystery products simply referred to as "iProd" and "iFPGA." See here.

Congress may have postponed the scheduled Feb. 17 transition to digital broadcast television on Wednesday — ensuring that millions of rabbit-ear TVs won't go dark for at least another four months — but that doesn't mean that the way Americans get their video entertainment isn't in the midst of wrenching change.

Take, for example, the story on the front page of Thursday's New York Times: Digital Pirates Winning Battle With Major Hollywood Studios, in which Brian Stelter and Brad Stone report that bootleg copies of Warner Bros' "The Dark Knight" were downloaded 7 million times in the space of 6 months — despite an elaborate antipiracy campaign, months in the planning, that included monitoring every physical copy of the film.

Or Microsoft's (MSFT) report Wednesday that more than 1 million XBox Live gold members (who pay a $50 annual fee) have activated  a Netflix (NFLX) app and used it to watch, in the space of three months, more than 1.5 billion minutes of movies and TV shows downloaded over the Internet.

Here you have both sides of the sermon Steve Jobs has been preaching to the studios for years: the "Napster moment" the Times article describes, in which pirates do to the movie and TV studios what they did to the music industry; and the alternative, in which video content is legally streamed or downloaded  — for a fee — from the Internet.

So where does that leave Apple TV, the set-top box that Jobs unveiled two years ago as Apple's (AAPL) path to Hollywood's salvation? Originally a device for connecting a computer wirelessly to a TV, it was updated last year to allow shows and songs to be purchased or rented directly from the iTunes Store.

Although sales of the device tripled last quarter, thanks largely to movie rentals, it is still a minor player in the transition from the old distribution paradigms to the new.

"We're going to continue to invest in it, because we fundamentally believe there is something there for us in the future," acting CEO Tim Cook told analysts during Apple's last earnings call, but he still refers to it — as Jobs did — as a "hobby." (link)

The pundits have offered a variety of suggestions for how Apple might solve its — and Hollywood's — dilemma by revamping Apple TV, including Peter S. Magnusson (who urged Apple to add a tuner, a DVR and a Blue-Ray disc drive), Bernstein Research's Toni Sacconaghi (who advised the company to turn it into a full-fledged Tru2Way cable box), and Businessweek's Arik Hesseldahl (who examined a variety of options earlier this week, including buying DVR-pioneer TiVo (TIVO)).

[UPDATE: Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster issued a report to clients shortly before noon Thursday with his own predictions. See below the fold. ]

But the most thoughtful analysis so far may be the one posted Thursday morning at Roughly Drafted Magazine by Daniel Eran Dilger, who looks at what Apple should — and perhaps more important, shouldn't — do with Apple TV.

"Analysts have voiced a lot of terrible ideas that would actually dismantle or saddlebag Apple TV," he writes, "converting it from a fun hobby into a burdensome money pit failure."

Here, in thumbnail form, are his take on what he calls some of the worst ideas:

• Add a DVR, perhaps by buying up TiVo. "The only thing worse than jumping into a dead market long after the lights have been turned out is buying out the leading failure in the market in order to do so."
• Add an optical disk, perhaps Blu-Ray. "Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: Apple has been pushing digital downloads as an alternative to the DVD for years now, with pretty decent success."
• Add an HDTV screen. "This one takes the cake for ridiculous."

"Apart from those top three ideas for wrapping an albatross and a millstone around the neck of Apple TV," he continues, "there are a variety of smart things Apple could add to their box to make it far more valuable."

• Add iTunes radio features. "Plug Apple TV into your speakers and have streaming radio with graphics."
• More alternative content. "…the other big free content source is podcasting."
• Add an iTunes Store, and an SDK for interactive content. "Make it easy to download little $5 games and app, and Apple TV will explode with the same software interest as the iPhone."
• Additional support for user created content. "How about a custom client for also accessing me.com email, contacts, and calendar on the big screen, navigated by the iPhone’s keyboard?"
• Consider the controversial. "There are a variety of competitive services that Apple might benefit from partnering with, including ad-supported Hulu and subscriber-supported Netflix." (link)

Dilger fleshes out each of these options in considerable detail and in his usual lively style. The full piece is highly recommended.

See also:

• Tuning into Apple TV 3.0
• Apple vs. Netflix: How do they stack up?
• Apple TV Take 2: What's the hangup?

Below the fold: Gene Munster's predictions.

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Apple's (AAPL) last Macworld Conference and Expo opens Monday at San Francisco's Moscone Center, but the real action starts Tuesday at 9 a.m. PT (12 noon ET) with senior vice president Phil Schiller's opening remarks — the first Macworld keynote not delivered by Steve Jobs since 1997.

Nobody's expecting breakthrough products that rise to the level of the iMac (Macworld 1998), the iBook (1999), iTunes (2001) or the iPhone (2007), but this Expo is not without its drama, speculation and hype.

Our top 10 favorite Macworld rumors:

10. Snow Leopard release date. We know a lot about Mac OS X 10.6, thanks to Jobs' June 2008 announcement that it was coming, Apple's official description of the product and a steady stream of leaks from the developer community. What we don't know is when it will ship.

9. Unibody 17-inch MacBook Pro. By several accounts, this machine was supposed to be released in October, along with the new unibody 13-inch MacBook and 15-inch MacBook Pro. But display issues and problems with the optical drive reportedly pushed its release back "several months" — which brings us to next week's Expo. UPDATE: Seth Weintraub at 9to5Mac adds this twist: the new 17-inch Pro will sport a superslim longer-lasting nonremovable battery pack.

8. Revamped iWork. The big news on New Year's Eve was the "truckload" of information dumped on various rumor sites about iWork — Apple's homegrown answer to Microsoft (MSFT) Office.  The thrust of it was that what's now a suite of desktop applications — Pages, Numbers and Keynote — is about to be transformed into a collection of Web-based apps like the .Mac Web Gallery, suitable for cloud computing.

7. 32 GB iPhone. Whispers that Apple was set to double the memory of the top-end iPhone have been floating around since September, but AT&T's (T) post-Christmas $99 iPhone sale and word that Apple had sewed up the lion's share Samsung's flash memory production all point to a January release.

6. 64 GB iPod touch. Rumors of this memory upgrade go back even further. It was supposed to happen in August, then in September, and then before Christmas. With memory prices falling, time is more than ripe.

5. New Mac mini. Rumors of the most affordable Mac's imminent demise have given way to a flood of new specs, among them  2.0 or 2.3 GHz Core 2 Duo processors, NVIDIA graphics platform, dual display outputs and dual drives that can be configured every which way.

4. New iMac. Some inspired sleuthing in the extension files that shipped with the new MacBooks found references to NVIDIA chipsets for both a Mac mini and a new iMac — along with hints that the reconfigured all-in-one desktop was supposed to ship in November but got pushed into 2009 by unexpected delays. DigiTimes now reports that Apple has ordered shipments of 800,000 per month.

3. New iPod shuffle. FBR Capital Markets' Craig Berger, whose track record AppleInsider describes as "questionable," expects Apple to release a new and smaller version of the iPod shuffle sometime in the first calendar quarter — which started on Thursday. AppleInsider adds that it has picked up chatter of a new shuffle that would be flat as a credit card but thick enough at one end to fit a headphone jack.

2. New Apple TV/Time Capsule. This one also comes from an analyst. Shaw Wu, a veteran Apple watcher newly ensconsed at Kaufman Bros., wrote last week about the possibility that Apple will introduce a new consumer device — "an enhanced version of Apple TV and/or Time Capsule" — that would give users access to their media content, SlingBox style, from anywhere on the Internet.

1. Steve Jobs. Show or no-show, Apple's CEO is both Macworld 2009's No. 1 rumor and the No. 1 source of rumors — whether it be that he's stepping down, that his health is failing, that he doesn't feel there's enough news in Nos. 1-9 to justify a Steve Jobs keynote, or that he just doesn't feel like playing in Macworld's sandbox anymore. We favor the theory that he's set the stage brilliantly for a surprise cameo appearance. Er, UPDATE: See What's going on with Steve Jobs' homones?

Below the line:

• iPhone nano. Despite all the chatter — and spy photos — not this Macworld. Maybe later this year.
• iPod tablet. Maybe later this year. Maybe never.

Is there truth to any of this? We'll be flying to San Francisco Monday to find out. Tune in to this space early Tuesday for our Macworld 2009 live blog.

[Photo courtesy of setteB.IT.]

Below the fold: How Phil Schiller could hit a home run next Tuesday, as imagined on The Mac Observer's Apple Finance Board by one of the regulars, retired Air Force pilot Pat Smellie.

UPDATE: In case you haven't heard, almost none of this came true on Tuesday. By my count, the rumor mill is batting less than 150. See Live from Apple's last Macworld!

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If it was Steve Jobs' intention to take the wind out of Macworld's sails, he's done a pretty good job.

"Expectations are low," wrote Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster in a note to clients early Tuesday, one week before the first Macworld Expo keynote since 1997 that won't be delivered by Apple's charismatic CEO.  "No significant new products are expected."

"Fairly modest" is how Kaufmann Bros.' Shaw Wu described investor expectations for the Expo, which runs from Jan. 5 – 9 in San Francisco and which Apple (AAPL) has already announced will be its last. "Frankly, we would be a little surprised if there is a major announcement, as we believe it would make better sense for Steve Jobs to do so himself at an AAPL event."

Behind Steve Jobs' Macworld exit

Both Wu and Munster are looking for Jobs' keynote stand-in — senior vice-president Phil Schiller — to introduce updated iMacs and redesigned Mac minis — hardly surprises given that both machines are overdue for a refresh.

Munster has not given up on the "new form factor iPhone" — a.k.a. iPhone nano — that he once thought would be announced at the January event. Now he doesn't expect it to arrive before the end of Apple's second fiscal quarter, which closes in March.

And he is sticking with his famous prediction — the most optimistic of any mainstream analyst — that Apple will sell 45 million iPhones in calendar 2009. But he reminds clients that that figure is predicated on his belief that Apple will enlarge its iPhone offerings, vastly expand its retail outlets and significantly lower its prices. So far it's only done one of the three.

Wal-Mart to sell iPhone starting Sunday

Shaw Wu also sees "strong indications" of a lower-cost iPhone and other "larger form factor touchscreen devices" — a.k.a. iPod tablet — later in the year. His sources hint that Apple may introduce a new "consumer device" next week — possibly a jazzed up Apple TV or a superconnected Time Capsule — a.k.a. home server — that would let you grab your files or do backups from anywhere on the Internet.

And Wu hasn't ruled out the possibility that Phil Schiller will surprise everyone next week with a breakthrough product that nobody is expecting, if only to send the message that Apple is a "much broader and deeper company than one person, even if he/she is a living legend."

For our part, we haven't given up on the possibility that Steve Jobs will make a surprise cameo appearance during Schiller's keynote, if only to show that he's still kicking — Gizmodo's latest rumor to the contrary — and still very much in charge.

Like nature, the Apple rumor mill abhors a vacuum, and for much of this month it has been filled with talk of "the Brick."

What is the Brick? The question was first posed the day after Steve Jobs' "Let's Rock" keynote address by Cleve Nettles on the Apple blog 9 to 5 Mac. He wrote that a tipster with "a solid track record" told him that the mid-October introduction of a new line of MacBooks (see here) is "all about the Brick."

"What does 'The Brick' mean?" Nettles asked his readers. "Can anyone out there help us out?" (link)

Readers were happy to oblige. Hundreds of messages, dozens of blog postings, and at least two reader polls later, no definitive answers have emerged. Speculation reached a fever pitch this weekend after The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) reported that Apple had e-mailed resellers with instructions to remove and destroy all Apple TV displays and literature by 5 p.m. Sept. 30, when a webcast "kick off" was supposedly scheduled. Could the Brick be the long-awaited arrival of Apple TV, Take 3?

The Sept. 30 deadline, it turns out, is the anniversary of the debut of those Apple TV store displays, which suggests that the company may simply be destroying some outdated print material containing screen shots whose permissions have run out. (link)

But that hasn't slowed the flood of ideas about what Steve Jobs might have up his sleeve next. As is often the case with Apple watchers, the speculation says more about their needs and fantasies than Apple's (AAPL) product plans.

So what's on their wish list? A sampling of what some have suggested the Brick might be:

• An Apple TV with a built-in Blu-Ray disk, TV receiver, digital TV recorder and its own App store (link)
• A new Apple-branded gaming system (link)
• A Time Capsule with "smarts" that functions as an iTunes server (link)
• A redesigned and much more powerful Mac Mini (link)
• The announcement that Apple has aquired TiVo (TIVO) and is discontinuing the Apple TV (link)
• A tablet-sized Mac with a touch-screen keyboard (link)
• A low-cost MacBook to compete in the sub-notebook market (link)
• A wireless USB hub that that links keyboards, mice, DVD drives, networking, hard drives, new displays (link)
• Nothing brick-shaped, but rather a product or group of products sexy enough to "smash" Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows once and for all (link)

My favorite reader comment, posted by "cardiomac" on TUAW in response to a suggestion that the Apple TV was "not meant to be a computer," borrows from the "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock":

No! I am not a computer, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool. (link)

Does Steve Jobs have a surprise in store for the analysts and reporters gathering in San Francisco for Let's Rock — the dog-and-pony show Tuesday at which Apple (AAPL) is widely expected to unveil the next generation of iPods?

Peter S. Magnusson hopes he does — and what he's wishing for is a new Apple TV.

The Swedish-born entrepreneur (and founder of Virtutech) points out in a thoughtful post that the upcoming holiday buying season is a perfect opportunity for Apple to overhaul the set-top box that even Jobs admits has been less than a runaway hit — and Tuesday would be a perfect opportunity to unveil the new device.

Why now?

Because on Feb. 17, 2009, by Congressional mandate, all full-power analog TV broadcasts in the United States will cease. That means that not long after Christmas, tens of millions of American TVs will go dark unless they are connected to cable, satellite or an analog-to-digital converter box.

The U.S. government is offering every household two $40 credit card-type coupons to pay for these boxes and has set aside enough money to fund more than 22 million of them — with an option to increase that number to more than 33 million.* See here.

This is expected to create a huge market for converter boxes, most of which will do no more than bring that dead TV back to life and offer a new remote to replace the one that no longer works.

But it could also create a huge opportunity for Apple TV to stage a fresh assault on the living room — especially if Apple throws in a few more goodies that Magnusson spelled out in a wish list posted on Sunday:

• Blu-ray disc player; of course one that can also play DVDs and CDs.
• ATSC tuner. That’s a fancy way of saying over-the-air digital TV.
• 500G hard drive (1T optional).
• WiFi.
• DVR capability added to iTunes 8.0.
• Time Capsule functionality, in other words, Time Machine backup.
• Full Safari browser and support for (optional) keyboard.
• Various new and improved options for Internet video.
• Support for using the iPhone or the iPod touch as smart remotes. (link)

Magnusson wouldn't mind if the new box played games, but that's not a deal breaker. He also suggests that it would be nice if Apple's re-fashioned set-top box were seemlessly integrated with the iPhone, which would enable what he calls the "coolest thing of all":

"If I’m watching a movie with the sound turned way up, it would gently pause when my cell phone rings." (link)

Now that's a feature I can imagine Steve Jobs showing off on stage on Tuesday — and having a lot of fun doing it.

The timing is certainly right. The DTV era began at noon on Monday in Wilmington, NC, when all the major networks except the local PBS afiliate turned off their analog broadcasts in a trial run before the nationwide shutoff.

The original Apple TV was announced two years ago and started shipping in March 2007. The device got a major overhaul in January 2008 with the release of a software update that Apple dubbed "Take 2."

*UPDATE: Reader Jaime in Denver points out that that in all likelyhood, the $40 credit could not be applied to Apple TV for a variety of reasons, including the interfaces it supports. See Rule d. 54. here.