Rumor: Apple adding a H.264 chip from NTT to take over 1080p movie distribution? Unlikely

We a whole month of crazy rumors before Apple unveils new product, so here’s the rumor of the day: Robert Cringely from PBS thinks that Apple will add a chip from NTT that does 1080p H.264 decode and encode to its entire line of computers. The chip would cost as much as $50, which seems to be awfully expensive, but let’s put that aside for now. Cringely goes on saying that “it is within reason to expect they’ll claim to distribute 1080p over iTunes in two megabits per second… This is all about taking command of the 1080p video market”. First, what does video-encode do for Apple here? Secondly, why would you need a special-purpose NTT chip to decode H264 video when a $12 low-end GPU chip can do it? Commanding the 1080p video market is not a hardware problem.