FORTUNE — Apple (AAPL) analysts who had been counting on a new revenue stream in 2012 from sales of an Apple-branded TV set — and believe it or not, there were some — have two reasons to take another look at their spreadsheets.
1. Bloomberg on Thursday joined the Wall Street Journal in reporting that Apple’s talks with the cable companies and content providers have hit an impasse. Steve Jobs often said that access to live television and the movies and TV shows that viewers most want to see are key to developing a disruptive TV product. Those things aren’t coming any time soon, and without them, according to Bloomberg’s unnamed “person familiar with the company’s plans… Apple won’t be releasing a new TV product this year.”
2. Like the Journal — and most of the analysts we’ve been quoting for more than a year (see below) — the product Bloomberg’s source is talking about isn’t a television set at all. Rather, it’s a successor to the $99 Apple TV whose praises Tim Cook keeps singing. Could it be, as Asymco‘s Horace Dediu wondered aloud in a Critical Path podcast last spring, that Apple’s disruptive TV product is already here, right under our noses, “hiding in plain sight?”
See also:
- Tell me again: Why do we think Apple will build a TV set?
- Two analysts diverge on when (and if) Apple will build a TV set
- What did Tim Cook really say about Apple’s TV project?
- Can Apple fix what’s wrong with television?
- Another Apple analyst backs away from iTV’s inevitability
- Anatomy of an iTV rumor
- Forrester: Apple’s new TV won’t be a TV at all
- J.P. Morgan: No full-blown TV set from Apple anytime soon
- Jefferies’ Peter Misek went to Asia and thought he saw iTV
- The day CBS turned down Steve Jobs’ TV deal
- What’s on Apple’s iTV?
- An Apple TV set in 2012?
- Steve Jobs’ disruptive best-of-television service, revisited
- Steve Jobs on TV’s go-to-market problem
- Is Apple’s answer to TV’s big problem hiding in plain sight?
- An Apple-branded TV set? Not likely, says Toni Sacconaghi
- Piper Jaffray: Apple is already building prototype TV sets
- Apple’s Siri: A TV remote that you can talk to?
- The Apple-branded TV set: An analyst connects the dots
