Summary: We will soon be replacing our TVs more often than our PCs as the television advances towards becoming a simple and functional living room PC. The maker of this new hi-tech TV could be one of many companies, and it could certainly NOT be Microsoft.

And at the center of this transformation is the internet.

Mark Cuban recently said that we’ll soon be replacing our TV’s more often than we replace our PCs. I’d have to agree with Mark on this. The evolution of the living room is putting more pressure on the TV set to be able to do more.

Friend of webtvwire.com Eirikso has noted that there will likely be several versions of the AppleTV.

He gets this idea because the Apple TV is using a template in the Apple Store which is always used by Apple products that have different versions (e.g different hard drive size, premium models etc), rather than using the store template used for products that have only one version.

This no doubt infers that Apple will be releasing different versions/models of the Apple TV in the near future.

Remember back in February when Steve Jobs of Apple said he wanted to abolish DRM and encouraged media owners not to demand DRM in media sold through the iTunes store.

It’s been a number of weeks since the early February announcement from Steve Jobs but we are beginning to see the first signs of action.

EMI has announced that it will be making its entire music and video catalog available without DRM protection by May. Maybe I’ve missed some but this is the first real action I’ve seen of DRM being removed.

I was doing some consultation work the other week for an internet TV station which had me working with School kids, aged 13-18. I was amazed at how iPod happy these kids were. Practically every kid there owned an iPod, and if they didn’t, they wanted one. Congratulations Apple on one very successful marketing campaign!

The Apple TV was finally released last week and as I expected the reviews of the device are not that flattering. I’ve said already that the Apple TV was over-hyped and I’ve noted a number of alternatives to the Apple TV (now there are even more).

It’s not so long away before the internet and the TV become almost the same thing. We’ll surf the web on our TV, while also subscribing to internet TV shows, buying video downloads, and watching TV broadcast over a broadband connection.

However, there is still a long way to go with TV technology, and internet technology, still somewhat incompatible with each other. There are two major issues: