One of Steve Jobs’s more interesting comments in the biography written by Walter Isaacson’s, Steve Jobs, was his idea about the future of television.

In the book, Mr. Isaacson quoted Jobs saying, “‘I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,’ he told me. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.’ No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. ‘It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.'”

Since this Jobs’s quote first appeared, I have been trying to imagine how he came up with this idea and how he could confidently say he finally ‘cracked it.’

One hint to his reasoning could be his focus on content creation and manipulation done on the Mac since its desktop publishing days began in 1984. Two years after he left Apple, Jobs bought Pixar Studios in 1986 and began creating another form of content around digital movies.

I once had the chance to interview Sony’s founder, Akio Morita, shortly after Sony bought its first movie studio, Columbia Pictures, in 1992. I asked him why he bought a movie studio when Sony was a hardware company. He told me then, “In Sony’s view, movies are just software.”

Jobs saw movies as software, too, and I believe this was the start of his journey to formalize his thinking, which led to his “I cracked it” comment to Mr. Issaccson.

Interestingly, Apple did try to create a kind of hybrid PC TV in 1993 called the Macintosh TV to enter the home entertainment market. But it was a dismal failure and was discontinued in 1994.