The nice part about that prediction is that it doesn’t require us to wait around to see what Tim Cook eventually delivers — you can see what that looks like right now.

And, conveniently for Allaire, that vision also dovetails with Brightcove’s corporate strategy: Today, the company is rolling out a feature designed specifically to help developers build Airplay apps.

Okay. So what would those look like? Allaire is happy to show you:

One such product is telyHD, which hit the market in January and enables HD video chatting, via Skype, on television sets. It has a wide-angle lens that captures more of the space around you, making it ideal for group chats.

Now Tely Labs, the company that makes the product, is updating its software to include a full Web browser, and to work with Apple’s AirPlay for basic media sharing. It will also allow a user to control the telyHD with his or her smartphone, instead of a cumbersome remote control.

TelyHD users will be able to wirelessly share photos to their TVs by going into the camera roll on a Wi-Fi-connected iPhone or iPad, tapping AirPlay (provided an Airplay-compatible device is nearby) and selecting the telyHD as the destination. Previously, users could share media with other telyHD users by inserting a memory card into the back of the device and uploading it through chat.

And they can also ditch the remote: Tely’s new SmartRemote app for iOS and Android devices allows users to control the telyHD, search for Skype contacts and Web content, and start and end calls, all from their smartphones.

The new Web browser, which is accessible through the Menu option on the telyHD standard remote, works with both a USB-connected keyboard and mouse and the SmartRemote app.

AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg gave the telyHD a full review in January of this year; he recommended the device for video chatting, but noted that its remote control left room for improvement. TelyLabs introduced a new, seven-button remote about a month ago that current customers could get for free in exchange for the old remote.

The upside of a product like the telyHD, compared to other videoconference systems for the home, is that, at $250, it’s relatively inexpensive. There’s no additional monthly fee for video chatting.

The downsides? While the software update, called the Entertainment Suite, is free for the first 30 days, it costs $49 after the trial period ends. Also, while the new telyHD wirelessly sends pictures from a mobile device to the TV, it won’t share video or audio content across devices. And it doesn’t offer content-specific apps, the way some set-top boxes do.

TelyLabs also said earlier this year that a second, more expensive telyHD for business users was in the works, but has declined to say exactly when that product is expected to hit the market.

Much of the speculation has focused on whether a proper Apple Television monitor product would arrive, what size, shape and features it might present, and how it might integrate with Apple’s cloud services. Vitally, the speculation has also dovetailed with a belief that if and when Apple launches a TV (beyond the Apple TV puck offered today) that Apple will attempt to challenge the cable TV industry with a new subscription-based offering for mainstream TV content.

Will there be a new TV monitor product? What about an updated Apple TV puck? What does this mean for cable TV?

Asked about this at last week’s All Things D conference, Tim Cook was noncommittal, saying only that Apple TV is “an area of intense interest for us.” And that the company is “going to keep pulling this string and see where it takes us.”

In my humble opinion, the entire debate over whether Apple ships an actual TV set and introduces some updated iTunes video package is a complete sideshow for a broader and bigger phenomenon and transformation for how we all use TV, and that this transformation is already being rolled out by Apple.

However, before getting to that, I want to first put to rest the near-term question of whether Apple will launch a directly competitive product to cable TV — e.g., a multi-channel subscription TV product to the leading broadcast and cable content available today.

Apple’s Approach to Cable TV Content on their TV Platform

Apple will not anytime soon launch a competitive subscription video product to cable. There are deep structural and contract rights issues that limit their ability to do so, and Apple does not want to buy their way into premium content from top-tier broadcasters who are collectively making hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide from subscriber fees shared from Multi-Channel Video Programming Distributors (MVPDs such as Cable, Telco, and Sat TV).

Given this, I believe Apple will seek partnerships with the top cable companies for them to open up their APIs for their EPG, VOD libraries and Network DVR infrastructure so that Apple can offer a superior user experience on top of those services, in a carrier/operator independent manner, much as they did with the mobile telephony services of the leading telephony carriers in the world.

In such a model, you’d purchase and use an Apple TV device (more on what the devices will actually be below) and use it in concert with an existing subscription from a TV operator, and access the TV functionality as an App. Yes, cable TV will just be an app among what will be tens and then hundreds of thousands of apps on your Apple TV.

While this is likely the path Apple will pursue in the mid-term, I believe they are unlikely to get any of the very top-tier TV operators like Comcast and Time Warner to go for their proposal. At best we might see an Apple TV EPG App that interacts with linear broadcast streams using CableCard integration with your existing provider which they could more or less do without agreement from the cable operators, but given how much value the cable companies are putting into VOD and Network DVR features, it seems unlikely that Apple would be happy shipping such a limited feature set.

So, if Apple hasn’t “cracked the code” on disrupting how we purchase and consume subscription- and advertising-supported broadcast TV content, what is going to be so revolutionary about Apple’s new TV product?

Reconceptualizing TV as an Application Platform

To understand where I think Apple is headed, one really needs to step back and re-conceptualize how one thinks about TV. In my view, TV is the last screen to fall as a computing platform. What do I mean by this? That we should think of TV screens and monitors as the final frontier in Internet-based software applications, not as devices to watch and consume video content.

Properly conceived, a TV is a large high-definition audio/video rendering device that plays a role in displaying content and related data. While certainly the ideal device for consuming and using video-based content, it is also simply put the largest computer monitor in our lives, and one that very often presents in a social context — the living room, the conference room, the dorm room, the classroom, the retail store floor and shop window. In short, these TV monitors are at the core of all of our major social and economic activities.

And in recognizing the broader role that these monitors play in our lives we can begin to re-conceptualize TVs as not just screens for video, but as a rich computing surface for viewing information, playing games, communicating, learning, shopping and so forth. In the past, when trying to use these screens for non-video applications, we would connect them to a PC or laptop (to present a shared piece of content that a group could discuss or interact on), or connect them to a game console for playing games.

In general, most attempts to evolve the capabilities of the TV monitor into richer computing platforms have failed. There are many reasons, far too many to discuss here, but in short the TV monitor as computing platform has failed because of poor execution on software, software user experience and poor user interaction devices and paradigms.

The iPhone and iPad as Next-Generation TV Computers

It is precisely with this re-conceptualization of TV in mind that I believe Apple has “cracked the code” on TV. Specifically, Apple sees that TV monitors are just that — high-quality audio/video rendering devices — and that the real power lies in application platforms and user interaction devices that can be easily brought to bear on those monitors.

But rather that putting Apple software directly into the TV, they are bringing your existing Apple devices and applications to the TV set without requiring you to buy a new TV monitor. In short, the iPhone and iPad in your pocket or handbag is the next-generation TV set-top box, and it is both highly personal and highly social and capable of bringing hundreds of thousands and soon millions of rich interactive applications and experiences onto your TV set.

And this is where Apple AirPlay comes into the picture. Released with a significant upgrade as part of iOS 5 last year, and becoming a core part of OS X this summer, AirPlay allows a user to easily beam any content or application to an Apple TV device. The basic use case is that when your iPhone or iPad sees that an Apple TV is on your network, you can easily beam audio and video directly to the TV. This allows you to browse and discover any media on your Apple iOS device and experience and enjoy it on a TV, including even any videos that you encounter on the Web (assuming they properly support HTML5, HLS streaming and the players detect and surface AirPlay UI).

Already today, there are fantastic iOS Apps that take nice advantage of it — Netflix, MLB At Bat, CNN, MSNBC and dozens of other mainstream video sources can be browsed and selected on an iPad and beamed to the TV set. It’s an effortless and enjoyable experience.

But AirPlay is not just for video; increasingly, it is for any kind of application. In last year’s update to AirPlay, Apple introduced two new and inter-related concepts: AirPlay Mirroring and Dual Screen Apps. AirPlay Mirroring allows you to mirror your iPad (or iPhone) screen onto your TV monitor with ease (if you own an Apple TV, try the following — double click the round home button on your iPhone or iPod and swipe the bottom apps menu to the right once or twice and you’ll see the Apple TV icon, and you can then mirror your device).

This is incredibly powerful. It essentially turns your iPad into a powerful TV Apps platform that can render any application on the TV while enabling the user to use their touch-based device to browse, select, navigate, etc. To fully take advantage of this capability, developers need to create “Dual Screen Apps” that are aware of AirPlay and of the TV screen and the local touch-based iOS screen. And it’s already happening: From MLB, which allows you to use your iPad as a second screen for HD baseball game broadcasts, to games that render on the TV while using your phone or tablet as a controller, to many of Apple’s own native apps like iPhoto and Keynote which present rich interactive interfaces on the iPad while rendering media onto the TV.

TV Apps are here and they’re all about building dual-screen iPad Apps that interact with AirPlay-enabled Apple TV devices.

All of this hangs together if Apple is successful with a broadly distributed device to connect to your TV monitor. Today, that is the Apple TV puck. Even now, it is a highly compelling product — $99 for enabling your TV to become a general purpose app and content platform controlled and used from any iOS (and soon Mac OSX) device. I added one to every TV in my home, and now rarely use my Smart TV embedded OS or my cable TV set-top OS/interface. I’m playing games on my TV with my kids, watching movies, streaming live broadcast TV using authenticated TV Apps from companies like CNN and ESPN, and with dual-screen MLB it is hands down the best way to watch baseball with an iPad App in hand.

While there are clearly bugs and user experience issues with how AirPlay is implemented today (and this is clearly recognized by Apple, who have more or less kept AirPlay features on the down-low), it holds incredible promise and, more importantly, I believe is at the center of Apple’s emerging TV strategy.

The Next Generation Apple TV Device(s)

This brings us full circle to the core question — what will Apple’s next generation TV device products encompass and enable? If my analysis is correct, I believe that this will likely mean that the core focus for Apple will not be on their own TV monitor product, but on continuing to advance a device platform for extending iOS onto TV sets easily, while dipping their toe into the actual TV monitor business as well. What’s critical is that they be able to sell a massive volume of TV add-on devices to consumers who already own HD TV devices, because at the end of the day the core focus is on extending the iOS and iTunes ecosystem onto the TV, and the fastest way to accomplish this is with a commodity add-on peripheral.

At the core of Apple’s NG TV products will be new hardware and new software.

First, Apple will release a new Apple TV add-on product, though I expect that rather than using the current “puck” design it will instead be a thin black bar, perhaps 1 inch tall and 3 inches wide, that can easily mount to the top of almost any existing HD capable TV set. Like the existing Apple TV, it will have HDMI and power jacks on the back, but it will also include a high-def camera built into its face, as well as an embedded iOS environment that provides motion sensing and speech processing.

Second, Apple will also release a TV monitor product as well with identical capabilities as the updated Apple TV add-on device, but in a design and form factor that presents the Apple brand effectively. Why would they do this when it is such an established market with such long replacement cycles? In short, because they can, and it will be gorgeous and include the latest innovations in display technology, and will sell at a premium price that ensures a reasonable gross margin for Apple.

Third, Apple will provide updates to iOS that include significantly enhanced and improved AirPlay functionality, and where AirPlay capabilities become a more front and center aspect of the iOS experience. Additionally, they will release new iOS APIs for dealing with second screen device capabilities such as the new camera and microphone, motion detection and speech recognition. Developers will be encouraged to build iOS apps that are Apple TV ready, using dual-screen features and motion user interaction, among other things.

The Big Picture Isn’t Apple Cable TV, It’s the 500,000 TV Apps Already Here on iOS

Not to beat a dead horse here, but Apple will not, at least right now, re-invent the pricing and packaging and user experience of long-form cable and broadcast TV content, at least not much beyond the iTunes store. In fact, if anything, Apple will recognize that a deeper alliance with TV operators is inevitable (to build on their EPG, VOD and Network DVR APIs), and will push further into providing support for TV Everywhere authentication services in iOS, and evangelize broadcast brands to launch TV Apps for their networks and shows that take advantage of the NG Apple TV model described above. Further, they may seek alliances with the likes of Comcast to launch pure-play over the top (OTT) editions of products like XFinity as TV apps.

But it won’t matter, because with Apple TV, cable content is just an app. What matters is that soon potentially tens of millions of HD capable monitors will become a screen for the hundreds of thousands of apps running on devices that are already in your hands.

Jeremy Allaire is founder, Chairman and CEO of Brightcove, a leading global provider of cloud-based software used by media companies and marketers for online video and mobile apps.

On another level, however, I understand the motivation. When it comes to delivering audio-visual content to a wide audience, the Internet has lowered the barriers to entry so far that anyone with even the dinkiest camera can become a major broadcaster. The television industry may face a crisis of overhead when a large number of scrappy upstarts deliver comparable value with almost no fixed costs. Also, there are some aspects of the television business that the Internet simply does better, specifically when it comes to reaching an audience.

So there is the scent of blood in the water, and out of the resulting frenzy a few lessons have appeared. Here are four of them.

There doesn’t have to be a difference between a “channel” and a “show.”

You probably have a clear understanding about what a television channel is. Comedy Central is a channel. Your local CBS affiliate is a channel. A channel is the thing you tune in to at a specific time to watch a particular show. A channel runs a lot of shows on it. Time Warner Cable offers 900 channels. This seems like too many. Bruce Springsteen wrote “57 channels and nothing on.” That sounds so quaint now.

But if you have a conversation about YouTube channels with this concept of a “channel” in your head you may experience some cognitive dissonance. There are “tens of millions” of channels on YouTube. One company, Machinima, operates 3,380 of them. That’s literally 100 times as many channels as are owned by NBC Universal, and it’s not enough. YouTube just launched 100 more channels with premium content. YouTube must be using the word “channel” differently. Except they’re not.

Both a YouTube channel and a television channel deliver a stream of content from a transmitting device to a receiving one. Viewers tune in to a television channel by selecting its number; they reach a YouTube channel via its URL. The main difference is that the cost of creating a television channel from scratch is incredibly high, while on YouTube it’s pretty close to zero. Unlike television, a YouTube channel can turn a profit with very little programming. The comedian Ray William Johnson, for example, has one of the most lucrative channels on YouTube. It plays one show. That show adds 12 minutes of new programming per week.

If a channel online costs next to nothing, and you can build one around a single show, then why do television shows need television channels at all? Every once in a while there’s a lot of fuss about getting cable channels à la carte. But who cares about that when you can have à la carte programming?

I like to think about this in the context of “The Daily Show.” On cable, you’re limited to 30 minutes of “The Daily Show” per day, and you have to tune in at 11 pm or set your DVR to watch it. There could easily just be a “Daily Show” channel, with all the extra programming that Comedy Central now reserves for the Web site, plus spinoffs for the various “Daily Show” correspondents. More content means more places to sell advertising, which means more profit. One challenge, of course, would be getting the audience to modify its behavior, but new technology seems to be inspiring this already.

Programming can now be delivered to your television set through a remote control.

Let’s define “remote control” as a handheld piece of electronics that tells your television set what to do while you’re sitting on the couch. Smartphones and tablets fit into this category, and before you argue that this definition is too broad, I submit that an iPhone is no less a remote control than it is a camera. It commands your television set far more profoundly than your traditional remote control. At least, if you have an Apple TV. Which you should.

The Apple TV comes with a technology called AirPlay, which allows you to throw videos wirelessly from your phone or tablet to your television set. Got a movie sitting in iTunes on your computer? You can watch it on TV via AirPlay. Find a video you want to watch embedded on a Web site you read? If AirPlay is available, a little button will pop up and you can stream the video to your TV. Need some good recommendations? Try one of the many “discovery” apps out there, like Shelby.tv or ShowYou or VHX. They skim your Twitter and Facebook feeds looking for videos your friends have posted. And you can throw those to your TV.

There are apps for ESPN and Discovery Channel and PBS and other traditional channels that allow you watch their shows, on demand, on your TV, via AirPlay. There are also a growing number of apps for channels that have never been included in a traditional cable provider’s lineup. The Wall Street Journal’s news channel, WSJ Live, is one of them. Time Warner Cable doesn’t carry it, but my iPad does.

I should note that WSJ Live is also available in the main Apple TV library, so you don’t actually need to use AirPlay to watch it. But the fact that you can illustrates my point. The remote control has become a very personal device, one that you carry around with you all day long, one that you use to store and index your favorite media. A viewer is just as likely to watch a channel she’s added to her home screen as anything available in the cable menu. The programming of her choice routes through her remote control.

Marketing and distribution are often the same thing.

Last month, IFC released the entire first episode of the second season of “Portlandia” online a week before its airdate. They used an embeddable video player, so that any online publication could feature the episode on its Web site. Individual sketches from the show were also made available in the same way. IFC didn’t just tease the show or talk it up, they let people actually see it for themselves. The result was an 81 percent increase in viewership among 18-49 year olds when the show returned to the network.

There are few examples of this sort of thing happening before the Internet. A movie poster hanging in a theater where that movie is playing, perhaps, or a DVD insert in a magazine ad. But this is something the Internet does really well. A single sentence can promote a film and deliver it to your computer at the same time. Allow me to demonstrate: “This video is amazing.”

That, of course, is the lifeblood of online publishing. Here’s something that resonated with me, I’m recommending it to you, my audience. They call it “curating” now. Somehow that word got separated from “blogging” recently, and I’m not entirely sure how or why. I think Tumblr and Pinterest had something to do with it. But curating, which is a thing bloggers do, is a distinct talent. It’s highly respected in other manifestations, such as museum curators or fashion buyers or television programmers. It was curators who spread that “Portlandia” preview around. And when you factor in the marketing power they brought to that show, and you consider how much a network pays to advertise a program in general, there’s only one conclusion to draw. Online curators are the most undervalued talent in the television industry.

A few of those new YouTube channels seem to recognize the power of the curatorial voice. Vice, Pitchfork, SB Nation and the Bleacher Report all received funding to create new YouTube programming. Presumably their editors will create shows that they’d want to watch themselves, and with that level of personal investment, they’d vouch for those shows to their readers.

Television is no longer that different from publishing.

Just last week, the Gawker Media site Kotaku announced a programming schedule similar to that of a television network. This strategy was conceived well over a year ago, and is designed to sell audience size to advertisers, the way television does, rather than pageviews, which have been dropping in value for years.

This is only the latest example of conceptual overlap. Video embedding took off after the launch of YouTube, turning online publications into versions of The Daily Prophet, that newspaper from Harry Potter with the magical moving pictures on the front page. Some Internet video hosting and streaming services are built on content management systems designed for online publishing. When you upload a video to Blip, the last thing you click to make it go live is “publish.” Awl Music, the music video channel launched by The Awl in January, is run entirely on Tumblr. You can watch it on a television set connected to Google TV.

Both traditional and online publishers are producing original video series with increasing frequency. Reuters, Slate and The Wall Street Journal all have news and documentary programming on the new YouTube channel lineup. The New York Times and New York Magazine have been doing their own video programming for years. It’s only a matter of time before some of these compete with the cable news channels.

Eric Spiegelman produces the Web series “Old Jews Telling Jokes,” which is about to launch its fifth season. He helped bring the hit Japanese television show “Retro Game Master” to Kotaku.com, and he helped launch AwlMusic.tv in partnership with TheAwl.com.

The tiny, Atlanta-based company launched in October 2010. Run by CEO Juan Pablo Gnecco and CTO Alan Queen, Movl (pronounced (MOE-vul) develops what it calls “multiscreen, multidevice” apps that are meant to enhance the connected-TV experience.

In early 2011, Movl’s Pictionary-like WeDraw app won $200,000 as part of Samsung’s Smart TV apps competition. Last month, Movl announced that it had developed an app called SwipeIt, which works on Android phones and Samsung TVs (and is technically owned by Samsung), allowing users to “swipe” content from their phones and have it appear on their TV screens.

Now the company is working on something called Direct Connect, which adds to the existing Connect service and is designed to work with both the Wi-Fi and 3G capabilities of mobile devices. One example the company gave was tapping into a smartphone’s built-in accelerometer and using the phone as a game controller.

Movl is also experimenting with a multiscreen, interactive ad platform and something it has code-named Kontrol TV, which will offer shortcuts for users to find multiple TV apps from the same app — and not just channel apps, but also trends, tweets, and other social media references related to TV shows. The company is aiming for a May launch of Kontrol TV.

Essentially, Movl is to Samsung TVs what AirPlay is to TVs using the Apple TV box. While enabling users to “throw” content from their mobile devices to their TV screens, Movl also wants to package all the various TV-related apps on that mobile device into one “shell.”

The apps currently work on Samsung TVs, Google TV-equipped sets, iOS and Android devices. Movl said that it is becoming increasingly focused on developing everything in HTML5, which Gnecco and Queen say they see more smart TVs moving toward.

Cuban explained his interest in the company by saying he thinks smart TVs, as a platform, are getting ready to take off, as new TVs get more powerful by the day.

He also said he feels the introduction of an Apple TV — as in an Apple-manufactured television set, not Apple TV in its current form — wouldn’t necessarily disrupt small fish like Movl, because they might have an already-established user base if or when an Apple TV comes out. Apple won’t ever have 100 percent of the TV market, and both Samsung and Vizio have a solid foothold, Cuban believes.

There’s also the question of whether Movl’s new applications could potentially raise the ire of cable operators, who have been introducing their own apps for mobile devices, and who might not like Movl’s idea to aggregate all TV-related apps into Movl’s Kontrol “shell,” as the company describes it.

But Movl says it’s not looking to usurp other apps — it mainly just wants to make it easier for a user to toggle between various TV apps during a multiscreen viewing experience. The company has been speaking with some cable providers that are interested in using Movl as a possible white-label solution, it says.

Instead, I’m focusing on the ones that promise to bring me the TV I want to see, when I want to see it, without charging me a fortune. And without making me pay for stuff I don’t care about.

Try it yourself. See? Things get quiet in a hurry.

All that other stuff that everyone is talking about right now — new ways to get Web video onto your TV set, new ways to chat up your friends while you watch TV, etc. — is sort of interesting. Maybe it eventually turns into something really interesting.

But none of it solves the problem that regular people have with TV right now. Because they actually like TV quite a bit, and watch tons of it every week, and they’re okay paying for it, too, even if they say they’re not. They just want to pay less for the stuff they want.

Making that happen will require a lot more than using AirPlay to throw video from your iPad to your LCD, or making it easier to search the Web via a Google TV. It means fundamentally overhauling the TV business.

And while it can look like the TV business is loosening up dramatically — look at all those shows the networks are putting on the Web, for free! — it’s actually tightening up considerably — it’s getting harder and harder to watch that stuff, it turns out, without paying for cable, or going rogue.

Even the most interesting stuff I’ve heard about — selling TV “over the top,” via the Web — still contemplates buying bundles of channels from the programmers, which means that over-the-top TV will look just like cable TV. Just like satellite TV and fiber TV do.

“I think there’s not a lot wrong with the business models,” says Myspace owner Tim Vanderhook, who wants to launch his own over-the-top service this year. I’m not at all confident that he’s going to pull it off, but I’m sure the programmers are happy to have a chat. They love the idea of more buyers ponying up for their stuff.

One interesting variant you’re hearing more about right now involves keeping bundles intact, but buying less of them. If you don’t pay for ESPN, then you’re not going to get anything from Disney, including ABC Family and the Disney Channel. But if you can live with sports or kids stuff, you could save an awful lot — or put the money into other programming you do care about.

That’s not nearly as sexy as The End Of TV As We Know It, but it is doable. And I’ll definitely holler about that one, if and when we see it.

I am curious if any of those three set-top boxes you reviewed last week offer the movies in high definition.

A:

All of them do. If a service included on the box streams or downloads in high definition and you have an HDTV and the proper cable connection (usually an HDMI cable), then all three will output the video in high definition. The top-of-the-line Roku I tested (called the XS) and the Boxee Box support what’s called 1080p resolution, while the Apple TV and the entry-level Roku HD only support 720p. However, most experts say that average people, sitting at an average distance from a TV, can’t tell the difference between these two types of HD.

Q:

I have elderly parents who can’t seem to be able to use a mobile phone, and become very frustrated. Is there a phone that seniors can see and work? It needs to be simple.

A:

The best-known cellphone for seniors is called Jitterbug. It offers large buttons and a variety of operator-assisted features. We tested and generally liked an earlier model. The phone is sold by GreatCall, at greatcall.com, for $100. Another company, Doro, makes less expensive models with large buttons aimed at seniors. See this page. The Doro phones are also sold by a carrier called Consumer Cellular, which promises low rates and offers discounts to members of AARP. See here.

Q:

What is the preferred way to pair iPad 2 with a TV? By using the AirPlay feature or through the Apple HDMI adapter? Also, the upcoming iOS 5 operating system comes with this functionality built in, right?

A:

Each method is a bit different. AirPlay, which requires a $99 Apple TV, wirelessly beams a particular video you’re playing on the iPad 2 to a TV. The Apple HDMI adapter, formally called the Digital AV adapter, which costs $39 and requires an HDMI cable, beams the entire screen of the device to the TV. It works on both iPads, as well as on the iPhone 4 and the latest generation iPod Touch, and doesn’t require an Apple TV. In both cases, some video providers block the video stream from going to the TV, presumably due to their business policies or legal issues.

In the forthcoming iOS 5 operating system, using Airplay and an Apple TV will enable full-screen mirroring on a TV from an iPad 2, just as the physical adapter does today.

Email mossberg@wsj.com.