Apple’s TV hobby just got a bit bigger: Apple has added five new content providers to its sort-of set-top box, notably Time Warner’s HBO Go and Disney’s WatchESPN. Also available as of today: Satellite TV service Sky News, anime subscription service Crunchyroll, and concert subscription service Qello.
Apple TV owners who have access to HBO and/or ESPN have already been able to stream video from those companies’ apps to their sets, via AirPlay. But direct access via a dedicated app should be a plus.
This is absolutely consistent with my prediction for how Apple will approach TV: work within the current model (access to these new “apps” requires a cable subscription), even as they work to steal attention from traditional programming.
In other words, while I got the timing wrong, I still think my prediction of an Apple TV SDK is correct. In fact, the addition of controller support in iOS 7 is an obvious first step.1 In retrospect it’s obvious why it didn’t happen this time around: iOS folks were busy.
More on iOS 7’s hidden costs soon.
It’s also possible that I’m overfitting the evidence here ↩