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It was a very nice welcome to be able to listen (with an occasional glance down) to the Apple September 1 event on my iPhone while at work. I usually work with my little white earbuds in listening to hours and hours of podcasts on double-speed, so it wasn’t that much of a change.

Overall I was impressed with the updated family of iPod products. I don’t think too much of iPods outside the iPhone universe, but obviously it’s still a big and important product to Apple and many consumers. According to PC Mag, iTunes still sells more music than iOS apps.

The iPod Shuffle was great in V2 and upgraded but botched in V3. The latest V4 seems like the perfect marriage of the two. Something Steve Jobs conceded.

The new iPod Nano however puzzles me. I like the touch interface and small form factor of it. Did NO ONE notice that it DOES NOT support video though? Why is this? Is it because of the 1:1 screen resolution or the processing power?

I bought my wife the second generation iPod Nano (the “Nano Fatty”) years ago and it’s been a great little device for my son to watch shows (with no audio) before he got my old first-gen iPod Touch.

Now it looks like only iPhone and iPod Touch devices have video playback (oh and the iPod Classic which is still alive).

The iPod Touch update was a good surprise. This is the first iPod Touch to include any camera and it has both of the iPhone 4′s front and rear cameras. I figured it would be crippled with only the Face Time camera. And of course the new Retina Display, A4 chip, gyro-awesomeness, and all the other iPhone (minus the phone) goodness.

iTunes 10 has some good new polish on it. I am anxious to try Ping. Other then that, it’s iTunes.

The bummer though is the new AppleTV. It’s barely an update, though almost worth updating to from the old one to avoid the magma-level temperatures the previous generation AppleTV produces (it got so hot that it split the wood in my entertainment center).

The TV rental pricing is great, but I really wanted to see some kind of IPTV platform using HTML5 and playlists. It’s a little underwhelming to see 720p only video (though at least it’s 720p at 30fps instead of the first-gen hardware limitation of 720p24 or 540p30). And of course no application platform to develop for -just partnerships like Netflix, Flickr, YouTube -no Pandora.

The September 1 Apple event will start in just about two hours. Steve Jobs is presumed to come out and debut the refresh of their iPod lineup. Unfortunately Apple has created a reputation out of these events that is hard to live up to.

The Cupertino company creates amazingly polished products coupled with secrecy and showmanship that Apple event days are spectacles into themselves -even for NON tech enthusiasts. Anything that doesn’t live up to the last event is written off as a failure.

Having new iPods alone and an iPod Touch with iPhone 4 features/specs is not enough. I don’t care to speculate on new iPods or even the rumored 60 second iTunes preview.

So what do I think is going to happen?

Apple released a last-minute “Media Alert” announcing live-streaming.

Apple® will broadcast its September 1 event online using Apple's industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards. Viewing requires either a Mac® running Safari® on Mac OS® X version 10.6 Snow Leopard®, an iPhone® or iPod touch® running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad™. The live broadcast will begin at 10:00 a.m. PDT on September 1, 2010 at http://www.apple.com.

This stream is an MPEG2 playlist (m3u file), but what MANY people have pointed out is the latest Mac and iOS requirements to view the stream. TechnologMe pointed out an Apple link to test their live stream tech and have shown it working in VLC. Incidentally, I was able to get the stream in VLC on a Windows 7 machine.

When you look at the code for the Bip Bop All tester, it contains an HTML5 video tag.

<video src="bipbop/bipbopall.m3u8" controls autoplay ></video>

My prediction is the implementation of an AppleTV platform. An open platform you can create a “channel” for to distribute your media -like a Podcast, but live or cued, that can be played by an iOS device (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, AppleTV) or iTunes.

Apple has been pushing the adoption of HTML5. With MPEG LA’s recent announcement of copyright-free use for the end user of h.264, it looks like HTML5 will have an officially endorsed video format.

What if Apple helped push IPTV to the forefront with a new AppleTV and inter-operable system through the iTunes ecosystem using “open standards” like HTML5 and h.264?

Imagine anyone could create a “channel” to distribute their content. All the major networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox) could still broadcast their content through one of these “channels” with commercials intact but could be accessed through million more devices without the aid of additional hardware (tuners, etc.). Apple could start this but others could adopt the model for other portable devices (Android phones, Windows Phone 7 phones) and set-top devices (Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Roku Box, Google TV, blu-ray players and televisions).

This would be a paradigm shift in media distribution and would really hit the cable companies and benefit nearly everyone else -including the established networks. Even the premium cable content has an outlet for subscribed content. Instead of paying $80/month to your cable provider, you could buy the Viacom package for your IPTV devices.

I would love to ABC, NBC, and Comedy Central on the same level as Revision3 and the Twit Network.

The Apple September 1 announcement could be the first major step for IPTV.