Gadget giant Apple has unveiled a new app for watching TV that is has bravely called TV App, and which it hopes we will use for all our TV needs.
The launch was a bit of an afterthought during the launch of some new Macbook Pros and amid a launch war with Microsoft, which launched its own latest Surface efforts earlier this week. We’re not really bothered about laptops here at Telecoms.com, despite spending an alarmingly large proportion of our lives staring at one, so let’s focus on the app.
Apparently it’s a ‘unified experience for discovering and accessing TV shows and movies from multiple apps on Apple TV, iPhone and iPad.’ You can tell Apple wrote that because of the absence of the definite article before the product names.
Eddie Cue, Apple’s SVP of Internet Software and Services, wasn’t about to stray from that winning formula in his canned quote. “Using apps on Apple TV, iPhone and iPad has become the primary way for so many of us to watch television,” he revealed. “The TV app shows you what to watch next and easily discover TV shows and movies from many apps in a single place.”
That sounds great, but aren’t there already lots of EPG-type apps already out there? It looks like this one is designed solely for US Apple monogamists, and may well provide some extra functionality those people Cue has in mind, but seems to have little to offer the rest of us; especially as it has gone to market without Netflix or Amazon on board.
Light Reading attended the launch event and noted a similarity between Apple’s ‘one TV App to rule them all’ rhetoric and that of US cable TV giant Comcast. There was lots of talk of aggregating a bunch of different TV apps and having a single point of sign-in, which would be handy, but how many single, unified TV apps can the market sustain?