Apple’s acquisition of Lala foretells a push of iTunes as a web-service/data-portability model, starting with music streaming options. One hopes video will follow.

I am an Apple TV owner. It was a bit of a misfired purchase decision, given that I already had a Mac Mini connected to the TV via HDMI, so the only thing it gives me is HD movie rentals—a totally arbitrary value-add that iTunes on the Mac Mini *should* support.

I have the lowly 40GB model and it’s really just temp storage for the rentals. I don’t sync anything to it. All the media I *own* is in the Mac Mini’s iTunes library which itself resides via a shortcut on an external 1TB FW drive (thinking about a Drobo for redundancy). So I just switch HDMI inputs.

As to the Mac Mini and the owned media I store there, using the recently updated Library sharing, I can listen/watch on any iTunes equipped Mac (or PC, if I had one) in the house over WIFI. So no need to copy the files over (although interestingly, this network sharing still requires the DRM authorization *as* *if* I copied the files over).

Mind you, that all breaks down if I try to play the *HD* (~4500 kbps) Mad Men episodes I bought… they crap out on the WIFI. So for HD content, yup, I’d have to dupe it around the house, and, yeah, that season (which includes SD versions for free) eats up ~75 GB.

In the end of course, your’re right, all of this becomes a lot more interesting if/when iTunes becomes a streaming service, especially on the video side of things. Knowing Apple, the likelihood of this ‘lighter’ model extending to unrestricted device/client data portability is iffy at best.