According to analyst Brian White from Ticonderoga Securities, Apple is taking fast steps in preparing the launch of its Smart TV. White participated in a China electronics trade show this week and said in a note to investors that he picked up “data points” that point toward a “Smart TV” launch by Apple, possibly by the end of the year. Yet, these ‘data points’ offer no information on how the device is going to look like, apart from the size which is expected to be of 50 inches.

“The combination of Apple’s powerful ecosystem, industrial design savvy, powerful brand and ability to reinvent product categories could make Apple a powerful force in the TV world over the next few years.”

Knowing Apple, a great deal of design and usability aspects will be considered before a major roll-out.  Anything addressing Apple TV’s lacking features, really, such as connecting it to cable or satellite TV, a truly HDTV format, Blu-ray drive in the Mac Pro, displays with HDMI and real HD movies in the iTunes library as mentioned by John Martellaro at MacNewsWorld.

This is not the first time Apple has hinted at the launch of an Internet-connected HD TV, as analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray has picked up some ‘data points’ of his own regarding this matter. Most likely, Apple will launch the Smart TV at an approximate price of $2,000 and will lead to the realignment of the media market, making entertainment centers if they decide to add an iTunes TV subscription plan priced between $50 and $90 per month.

“As connected TVs gain traction, software, content and portability will become the key differentiators and Apple is uniquely positioned to deliver a premium all-in-one solution (different than Apple TV),” Munster wrote.

Online video is becoming a central point and Apple knows this very well. Noticing the industry trends of various media companies such as Reuters and Bloomberg, which have their own TV networks, CNBC joins in with updated players and content-expansion, to improve the users’ overall experience. With these improvements, CNBC users can now search and scroll through a real-time transcript synchronized to the playing video. CNBC is taking strenuous steps to keep up with the demanding online video market.

A recent study undertaken by comScore reveals that at the moment Google is still dominating the online video market with its 82% of unique visitors, meaning 143 million unique visitors in 2 billion sessions, followed by AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, VEVO and Facebook. The report says that 174 million U.S. internet users watched online video for an average of 14.8 hours per viewer in a total of 5.7 billion viewing sessions in March.