Now the conventional wisdom has shifted again: No TV set, and maybe very little else from Apple on the TV front, in the near future.

The newest version of this thought comes from Pacific Crest analyst Andy Hargreaves, who met with Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer and media boss Eddy Cue on Wednesday. Here’s his takeaway on Apple TV, published in a note yesterday, and first flagged by Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

An Apple Television Appears Extremely Unlikely in the Near-term
Relative to the television market, Eddy Cue, Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services, reiterated the company’s mantra that it will enter markets where it feels it can create great customer experiences and address key problems. The key problems in the television market are the poor quality of the user interface and the forced bundling of pay TV content, in our view. While Apple could almost certainly create a better user interface, Mr. Cue’s commentary suggested that this would be an incomplete solution from Apple’s perspective unless it could deliver content in a way that is different from the current multichannel pay TV model.

Unfortunately for Apple and for consumers, acquiring rights for traditional broadcast and cable network content outside of the current bundled model is virtually impossible because the content is owned by a relatively small group of companies that have little interest in alternative models for their most valuable content. The differences in regional broadcast content and the lack of scale internationally also create significant hurdles that do not seem possible to cross at this point.

Bear in mind that the above is a mashup of Hargreaves’s analysis and guidance from Apple executives. So you’ll have to do some guesswork to figure out exactly what Apple is saying and not saying.

But it makes perfect sense, because it’s what Apple has been saying consistently when asked about Apple TV or any other new product. And it also reflects the truth that anyone who has tried to tackle a TV Of The Future has figured out: Making the tech work better is (relatively) easy. Making the content work better is really hard.

As Business Insider’s Jay Yarow notes, Hargreaves’s takeaway is a bit different from the newest round of Apple TV prognostication, kicked off by reporting in The Wall Street Journal, which posits that Apple is no longer trying to “disrupt” TV, but wants to work with the existing TV Industrial Complex, by making slight tweaks to the model.

But even that reporting suggests that Apple isn’t anywhere close to getting buy-in from cable programmers or providers. And so it can’t bring out new hardware — box, screen or otherwise — until it makes progress there.

That still doesn’t rule out any advances with Apple TV. It would seem totally reasonable for Apple to open its existing Apple TV box to outside developers, which would increase the utility of that hardware significantly without requiring any buy-in from TV Land. Just as Apple TV competitor Roku has already done.

For a couple of reasons:

• Apple has already told us it will be about education, which is both an interesting and potentially giant market. But for lots of people, that’s not nearly as exciting as, say, an Apple TV could be. (Not a lot of hype about e-textbooks at CES this year. Plenty of Connected TV chatter.)
• People who know things about Apple have made a point of tamping down expectations. For starters, note that it’s in New York, not Apple’s Bay Area backyard, where it puts on its really big shows. Also note that Apple media boss Eddy Cue is supposed to be front and center, not CEO Tim Cook.

So, with a bit of air let out of the event in advance, the big remaining question is this one: Does Apple plan to blow up the textbook business, or just help it evolve a bit?

If you have time this morning, you can read two takes by professional Apple-watchers Philip Elmer-DeWitt (who’s in the “evolve” camp), and John Gruber (why not blow things up real good?).

We’ll know shortly. As I mentioned yesterday, the key thing to watch at the Guggenheim is whether Cue brings up reps from the big textbook publishers like Pearson and McGraw-Hill onstage, or whether the focus is on letting educators and others build their own books, so they can bypass both the publishers and the antiquated textbook procurement system.

A lot more fun to write about if it’s the latter, but AllThingsD will be there, regardless. Check back here around 9:45 am ET for a link to live coverage.

There are 72,000 paid apps in Google’s store, compared to Apple’s 211,000. But more important is the number of apps the stores are actually selling, and that’s where analytics firm Distimo weighs in. It says that when it comes to big hits, Google’s store is much further behind.

The most telling data point: Distimo says only two paid apps have been downloaded more than 500,000 times worldwide since Google’s market opened in early 2009. But it says six paid apps in Apple iPhone’s app store did similar volume in March and April–in the U.S. alone.

As Fortune.com’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt notes, this report is from the same people who riled Apple fans last month with a study that said Android was set to catch Apple in the sheer number of apps available. So perhaps next month they’ll come out with a study that makes Android boosters happy again.

But Distimo’s newest report does seem to sync up with comments we’ve heard from developers in the past: They’re interested in distributing their stuff via Android, but they’re not sure they’ll be able to sell it there.

Here’s the way MLB.com chief Bob Bowman put it in an April interview: “The Android user typically is less likely to buy, and therefore the ROI on developing for Android is different than it is for Apple….The iPhone and iPad user is interested in buying content-–that’s one of the reasons they bought the device. The Android buyer is different.”

[Image credit: drinksmachine]

Free bonus clips! (And please, if you want to tell us that you can’t see these outside of the U.S–we know! But as always, we also imagine that you can get them in some form, with some digging. More important, I think some of you are going to need to consult Wikipedia in order to figure out who people like Colin Ferguson and Tammy Faye Bakker are.)

Here’s what qualifies as a man-bites-dog story these days: A big mainstream business publication hiring an experienced business journalist.

Weird, right? But true: Fortune magazine has hired veteran writer Dan Roth to run and revitalize the title’s Web site. He starts as managing editor next week.

This qualifies as news because:

• Big magazines–and business titles like Fortune in particular–have been shedding jobs, not creating them. Roth, for instance,was a victim of layoffs at Condé Nast’s Wired magazine last fall–just after he published this excellent and sobering analysis of Demand Media, in which he describes what its ascent says about the future of “content creation.”
• Fortune hasn’t done much with its site for some time. So rehiring Roth, a well-regarded writer and editor at the magazine from 1998 to 2006, signals that it has ambitions to do…something with it.

For the past several years, Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. has allowed Fortune to more or less languish on the Web, while letting its CNNMoney.com site do the digital heavy lifting for all things business, which it does pretty well, attracting more than 13 million unique monthly visitors, per comScore (SCOR).

Fortune.com, meanwhile is minimally staffed and serves primarily as a repository for the magazine’s print stories, the occasional special package and a steady stream of updates on Apple (AAPL) from the prolific Philip Elmer-DeWitt. Put it this way: Roth won’t be displacing anyone by taking the top editorial job at the site, because the site hasn’t had a full-time edit person running it for a couple of years.

But now, though Roth won’t say so out loud, it appears that the Time Inc. braintrust has decided to reinvest in Fortune.com and will give him the ability to make more hires. Here’s his more modest description of his job description:

I think Fortune has the chance to take what it does best–covering the most important companies and business people–and reinterpret that for the Web. The goal is to take the intelligence found in the magazine’s long-form features and make that voice and worldview work in a shorter form and at a faster pace.

Disclosure: I worked with Dan for a few months way back in the late 1990s, and he interviewed me when he wrote about my last employer a couple years ago. It’s a good read.