Until now, Apple TV has been a fringe product for the company. Apple has long criticized current television formats and CEO Tim Cook once described TV as "stuck in the seventies," but now the company seems set to enter the market in a big way.
Already this week, Apple announced a TV Web subscription service will launch in the fall, and new reports suggest a new Apple TV device will be released this summer.
According to Buzzfeed, Apple will debut the device at its annual World Wide Developers Conference in June. The company is also expected to launch a new Apple TV App store alongside a developer kit to help programmers create apps.
The current Apple TV device, originally launched in 2012, has recently been discounted, which would suggest that Buzzfeed's report could well be accurate. The sources claim the new device will be a significant upgrade that could shake up the market that currently is made up of a lot of similar products from Amazon, Roku and Google.
Though no official details have been released yet, the new Apple TV is expected to support Siri, have the latest A8 system-on-chip and significantly more memory that the 8GB on the current version.
If the device is to be truly "game changing" as Apple products tend to be, then it's likely to offer more than just the streaming TV of its predecessor and competitors. Voice activation would be interesting, but there has been speculation that it could be a device to control your entire living room. Certainly, an "Internet Of Things" device that could control your room's lighting and heating as well as connect to your entire Apple ecosystem, all while watching TV, would be a "game-changer."
Apple is keeping tight-lipped with its usual canned response, refusing to comment on rumors and speculation, so we're just going to have to wait until June to find out the details.
Earlier in the week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple will launch a new Web TV streaming service in fall 2015. The service would offer a smaller, more select group of channels that are currently available in cable company bundles but would still offer a choice of channels from all the major networks. It has long been a complaint of customers that they pay for a huge number of television channels in their bundles that they never even watch. Pricing is unclear, but a monthly subscription is expected to cost between $20 and $30.
