OK, maybe Apple would have kept Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, on Apple’s board if Google’s tech-hegemony had stopped with Android. Maybe, maybe even the Chrome browser might have been acceptable.

But a streaming rental movie business?

AppleTV might only be a “hobby” Apple continues to invest in (as Tim Cook, Apple president/COO, said during a recent earnings call) but it’s a really important “hobby” with significant long-term potential.

Short answers: Perhaps and unlikely.

This tells us the Beatles, MTV and Rock band are going to punch parts of the Beatles storied catalog into the digital age via video games. MTV’s RockBand unit, including Harmonix (which makes the actual gear) are going to release “The Beatles: Rock Band” on 9/9/09. (I can only guess that this is a play on “Revolution 9” from The White Album.) The new game will be available on Xbox 360, PLAYSTATION 3 and Wii consoles. 

When I was a kid in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s (that’s 1960s and 1970s), one of the adolescent litmus tests for any new set of social engagements was were you a Beatles person or a Stones person. (Queen vs. Rush? Please.) I suppose now the litmus test will be “what’d you score on ‘Across the Universe?’ “

In other news here (WSJ, subscription required), Universal Music and YouTube are apparently hammering out a deal, or trying to anyhow, to create a channel for premium music videos.  The hope is that premium video from rightsholders like Universal could mean premium ad dollars. Perhaps.  In the WSJ story, Google CEO Eric Schmidt muses that something like an “iTunes” for music videos is needed. I dunno. Music videos started out as promotional fodder; accounted for in the same cost lines as travel, hotel-room damages and “flowers and favors” and it seems as if consumers value them about at about the same level.

To be sure, I think Schmidt was invoking iTunes’ “experience” value to consumers, not as a pure transaction storefront.

There might be something to this approach in as much as we also saw last week an announcement from BayTSP in which five major studios signed on to use BayTSP’s Content Authentication Platform to identify copyrighted content on UGC and video sites. BayTSP’s system includes metrics for tracking viewership to enable serving advertisements against the videos.

Just like birds got to fly and fish got to swim, rightsholders have both a need and requirements to enforce copyright, so the MySpace and BayTSP announcements don’t mean that we’ll never again see another lawsuit against a site for contributory infringement, nor will it mean the end of sites being hit with notice-takedowns. 

Instead, these announcements point to the realization by some media companies that monetizing certain behaviors is a whole lot easier than trying to engage in behavior modification on a massive scale.