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Well, it's over. The Macworld keynote has come and gone. The big news of the keynote was the iPhone. The iPhone announcement has become the top story of the year on Digg.com in less than 10 hours. The phone has gone way beyond anything I imagined it could be. The price point is high, however the device will replace your iPod and cell-phone while providing features that neither device is currently capable of. As great as this device sounds, this post is not about the iPhone. This post is about the Apple TV and how it will revolutionize home entertainment as we know it.

Apple announced yesterday that the Apple TV will be released sometime in February. It will ship with a retail price of $299. I won't spend much time talking about the specs of the machine. All the technical mumbo jumbo can be found here thanks to Engadget.

The Apple TV hasn't really received the best of receptions. Many critics have cited that the X-BOX 360 does the same exact things for the $100 more. The 360 is also a great gaming platform which offers HD movie downloads.

The Apple TV is still a much better alternative for iPod or Macintosh users. The Apple TV is basically Front Row for a television. If you haven't used Front Row, it is a media center which uses nearly the same user interface as the iPod. Anyone who has used the interface understands that it is wonderfully intuitive. Music, videos, pictures, and podcasts are all perfectly arranged into categories.

I understand that the X-Box 360 might have a similar feature set. However, Apple announced a little something many people might of forgotten after they heard about the iPhone. I will quote this announcement from Engadget.

"There was an article recently stating that iTunes sales have slowed dramatically; I don't know what data they're looking at..." (Shows chart with insane upward slope.) "We are selling over 5 million songs a day now. That's 58 songs every second... the last time we talked we were the fifth largest music retailer in the US. We have now passed Amazon; we sell more music than Amazon and we are now #4."

Apple's big weapon is the iTunes Music Store. Many people might still pirate through torrents or P2P, but Apple has proven that there is a market for legal music downloads. Apple has shown with these statistics that people will pay for music. Plain out, people will spend money in an online music store. Apple is now the 4th largest music retailer in the US. Apple has proven that people will pay for digital content. Apple has greatly increased the amount of movies available on the store thanks to a recent agreement with Paramount. Apple needs to find a way to bring more television programs to the service while lowering the prices through some sort of subscription program.

The Apple TV might not win over X-Box 360 owners or those with HD capable TiVos. Apple will be able to win over users who have purchased large quantities of content from their online store. Apple might also be able to win over a large portion of young users. The young generation has shown that it would prefer one service at lower prices over multiple services. Land line phones have become a thing of the past among the twenty-something group of users who only own cell-phones. These users can now download and buy the single shows they watch weekly instead of giving anywhere from $50 to $90 a month into the hand of a cable company. This deal is sweetened by the fact that this content can be taken anywhere on an iPod they already own.

Digital distribution is a thing of the future. Apple has created a device that will connect an online store and the television better than any other product available. The product will revolutuonize how we look at entertainment when it launches next month.