Big news coming from Apple’s highly anticipated press event in San Francisco this morning; Steve Jobs unveiled the all new Apple TV, iTunes 10 with a Ping social network, and completely redesigned iPods across all its models.

This raises the bar for competitors like Amazon, which made an announcement regarding its own streaming initiatives this week as well.  Apple has predictably landed several large broadcast and large brand partnerships for its new streaming content offerings, with sprinkles of commercial marketing opportunities layered into its iTunes Ping social music discovery tools (i.e. concert recommendations lead to more ticket sales).

There’s also the question of how open Ping’s social network will become–what type of content will individual users be able to share, where can it be shared, and how easily can updates be shared to other networks?  Considering the markting and branding opportunities around Facebook (think Amazon integration), there’s even more commercial potential behind Ping, if Apple really wants to go that route.

Beyond this, we’re happy to see Apple’s plans for expanding interoperability and interface usability around its existing products, as the company seemed to lose sight of maintaining consumer interest at this level, given competing services that have bubbled up in the past two years.  We expected an announcement of this magnitude (for Apple TV in particular) just before the holiday shopping season, as Google announced its own TV goals earlier this year.

Here are the highlights.

Apple TV:

Smaller design (fits in the palm of your hand)

Support for HDMI, Ethernet, Wifi

100% rentals

Price drops for all rented content (television shows and movies)

Netflix streaming

YouTube, Flickr, MobileMe integration (Hulu was noticably absent)

Stream your content (photos, videos, etc.)

iTunes 10 with Ping:

New logo, and album art view

Social network called Ping

Social search, discovery and recommendations

Creat custom lists to follow – Circle of Friends

Share playlists, comments

Find concerts near you

Facebook-like interface

Available today

iPod Touch:

Now comes with FaceTime (including support for iPhone)

Most popular portable game player

Thinner design

HD video recording

Video editing

Shipping next week

iPod Nano:

46% smaller, 42% lighter

Clip-on

Touch screen

Photo integration

Swipe to flip through media

New colors (red, graphite, pink, blue, yellow, green)

iPod Shuffle:

Voice-over intro for song title & artist

Buttons & playlists

15 hr battery

new colors (yellow, pink, green, blue)

iOS 4.2:

Available November, 2010

Other announcements:

AirTunes & AirPlay for streaming all media over WiFi