Apple, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) announced late yesterday that it has sold 200 million TV episodes over its ubiquitous iTunes service. While that is quite a milestone for the company, it still pales in comparison to the billions of songs the company has sold. Still, not all iPods can display TV shows and videos. It's foolhardy to expect the entire installed base of iPods to do anything but music, although all newer models and the iPhone can download and display video programs.

The bigger news is that all that content could be seen as a pretty significant boon to some of the largest content providers -- NBC and Disney (NYSE: DIS). Disney CEO Bob Iger indicated that his company has sold "40 to 50 million" TV shows over iTunes. I won't repeat that the television viewing paradigm has shifted. Well, unless ratings firm Nielsen says it first.

Silicon Alley Insider did the math and determined that iTunes paid out about $280 million in TV show revenue sharing in the last three years, compared with NBC Universal's latest quarterly profit of $645 million. The 36-month figure of $280 million sounds a tad paltry, but in all reality, this is just the beginning. More and more consumers will get content from devices like iPods, and that amount will only grow over time. As has been the case with Apple for some time, the company is positioned to be a growing content distribution provider. Why? It was there first in almost every way.

One interesting note about the iTV that hasn't received all that much analysis as one would expect in the general media is the fact that the iTV has a small hard drive in it. Disney's Bob Iger let this little aside drop during a Goldman Sachs conference where the big announcement was how many Disney movies had been sold through iTunes in the first week.

The implication of the iTV device having a hard drive is interesting, because it beefs up the iTV's media capability. This isn't just an iTunes streaming device, but a competitor to digital video recorders like TiVo. Add to that this Roughly Drafted article that points out that the iTV has a HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) and you can see that Apple is going after a rich multimedia experience and that this is not a simple wireless settop box.

Mr. Iger even makes such a reference when he says at the same conference that "...it may be an opportunity to actually charge people for a TVR experience. In that if they've forgotten to set their TiVo device or their TVR or they just have no plan to do it but they want to watch an episode that they missed, they can go to iTunes, buy it for $1.99..."

Now, the iTV doesn't show signs of being able to snag cable content like your average DVR, which makes it not quite the universal replacement device. But it will be interesting to see how large the hard drive will be, and whether iTV will be able to be modified to work as a DVR by 3rd party programs or even Apple itself thanks to the hard drive. All this makes for iTV being a very interesting salvo in Apple's battle to become a media company with media solutions, and certainly an exciting development in Apple's quest to become the center of the digital entertainment arena, linking both the traditional entertainment area and the new.

Will iTV be able to solidly compete with DVRs, or will it just be an addition for the iTunes faithful? And will you be buying one?

Tobias Buckell is a freelancer, author, professional blogger, and owns shares in Apple stock.

Apple Computer, Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) ended the day at $75.26, up $1.49, a 2.02% increase in price. Certainly a lot of that can be attributed to some positive news that has come out over the first half of the week. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is rumored to be planning to work with Apple's iTV, and Apple has already cleared $1 million in movie sales in one week, prompting Disney to predict that it will bring in $50 million in sales in the program's first year.

All of this points to Apple both incorporating web 2.0 video strategies and its download strategies into its media ecology, as well as providing a set top box that brings it all together. No wonder the buzz seems to be growing strong for Apple stock.