For as long as I can remember it’s been the case in the CE industry that competitors are also often collaborators. The interplay between OEM equipment production (exhibit A is the recent teardown that demonstrates that 1/4 of the iPhone is made by Samsung), strategic partnerships for good or ill, etc. all play up the entertainment that industry watchers get from watching competitors work together even as allies take each other to court (and vice versa).

That same business model (that I’ve dubbed “Strategic Frenemies”) is now evident in streaming media. However you look at it, the streaming media business is heating up and getting crowded, and that makes for strange bedfellows.

Witness the fact that the latest iteration of AppleTV comes with Netflix embedded. In exactly the same way that hardware manufacturers have snuck Blu-ray players into people’s houses by embedding Netflix in them (“And best of all” the salesman says “You can watch Netflix on your new Blu-ray player!” How can anyone say that with a straight face?) including Netflix is a gambit to get AppleTV into people’s homes.

As keen as Netflix execs are to increase their subscription base, especially in the face of the reported cancelations in the wake of their combination rate increase/PR blunder, surely they can clearly see that this is Apple’s Trojan Horse? Or maybe a more apt analogy would be some kind of gruesome oceanic parasite that tricks its prey into swallowing it, only to eat it alive from the inside.

Apple is already heavily promoting its own iTunes HD and SD video VOD, rental and purchase services. At what point will they reach a sufficient installed base of Apple TVs and volume of streaming dollars that they can pull the plug on Netflix? Worse yet for Netflix, at what point will AppleTV owners simply not notice or care?