Kind of a fun thing to imagine, based on the prognostication of a Google exec: an iPod that holds all the world’s television, coming to an Apple Store near you in 12 years.

It’s all totally hypothetical based on some extrapolation of current data storage trends, but I’ll add some additional musing to the picture. First off, if we look at how iTunes behaves with music, we can get some clear potential possibilities.

One thing I’d like to see is updating iTunes to rip DVDs and compress video, in the same way it does with CD audio (yeah, there’s that copyright thing… but I’m dreaming). With increases in processing power, in 12 years a computer might make short work of this, ripping and encoding a full DVD in under three minutes if not seconds.

The other thought is that PVR technology will be ubiquitous with all of its recorded digital content ready for pushing to an iPod. If data storage is small and cheap enough, you could just leave a PVR on 24/7 and sort through it later.

Next we’d need some kind of super-fast fast data connection that can quickly shove terabytes of data to iPod. It might as well be wireless.

Another other option is maybe you buy the iPod and it has tons of video content already loaded on the thing (all of last year’s movies for example). I wonder how much that would cost, though? I’m sure the movie industry will still be around, expecting royalties from all this, or the very least saddling it with DRM.

Maybe 12 years in the future, we’ll have Google CGI ads, so when some character in a movie you’re watching is reading a book, it will have a book title you’d be interested in digitally pasted over it (based on data from your Google Biometric ID of course). But if it meant a free movie for me, I’d tolerate it.

Disclosure: I own a tiny amount of Apple stock.

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