TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

In a rather dull report from the Wall Street Journal on Apple’s intentions for TV, there was one line of interest:

Apple’s uptick in talks with its media partners is part of the company’s strategy to change the way consumers watch TV, just as the company transformed the music and cellphone industries. Mr. Jobs envisioned building a TV that would be controlled by Apple’s mobile devices in order to be easier to use and more personalized, according to people familiar with the matter.

I don’t find that particularly surprising, but it does shed a bit of light on what Jobs meant when he told Isaacson that he had finally “cracked” the problem of making a good TV. Relying on iOS devices to control the TV would solve a couple of the biggest problems with an Apple TV: what kind of remote to use to control it and how they get around the issue that people purchase new TVs only every five years or so, which means the device’s capabilities would be quickly outdated.

It’d certainly be an interesting model. Apple TV applications could reside on the iOS device, and the TV acts more or less as a dumb display. Managing applications would be simple and so would controlling the TV, and even better, the Apple TV’s capabilities could be upgraded with each new iPhone or iPad, since what it can do would depend on them.