Apple announced the New Apple TV yesterday, showcasing Siri, the App Store, and a new remote. All of this was overdue, necessary, rumored, even expected. But the real story is in what comes next.

The initial focus of the Apple TV, and the accompanying editorials and reviews, seem to be focused on the device as a target for the “casual gamer,” but this is a very short-sighted view. It’s no coincidence that Apple described their new iPad Pro as containing a “console-class” GPU.

Benchmarking Apple’s recent offerings to the current console offerings shows a significant gap between them. From a CPU perspective, the iPad Air 2 Geekbench score has only 57% the performance of a PS4, and its GFXBench score on the Manhattan test is less than 50% of the current console offerings.

But put that in perspective – the iPad Air 2, a year-old device running on a battery, provides approximately half the performance of the latest generation of console gaming devices, and at a similar price point. What happens when you remove the power and cooling limitations present in a tablet?

The new Apple TV is also using last year’s CPU/GPU from Apple – the A8. This is likely a compromise Apple made to focus CPU foundry capacity on the iPhone 6s. As the latest generation components are often supply-constrained, Apple would dedicate their supply on meeting sales goals for the new handset, and as production yields improve, move that component down the product line. So what would that mean for next year?

If the next generation of Apple TV includes the A9 CPU and GPU, it would likely be on-par with the current generation gaming consoles. And with an annual Apple upgrade cycle, how long before it eclipses their capabilities? With consoles having a 4-7 year release cycle, it is without question that Apple TV has the ability to surpass the current generation’s capabilities before their next refresh.

The next concern is storage required for today’s immense games. With Batman: Arkham Knight weighing in at 45GB on the current consoles, how can the Apple TV with its meager 32GB base offering hope to compete? Further, Apple is limiting Apple TV apps to a ridiculous 200MB, this excluding any “real” games form ever making it to that platform. What is Apple doing here?

What they are actually doing is fixing much of what is wrong with console gaming today. By looking at what Sony and Microsoft did wrong with their recent console launches, Apple has developed an entire set of APIs to greatly improve customer experience even for huge, content-rich games like those available today. The core application and associated assets (images, maps, music) is limited to 200MB. Then, the application can request additional assets, called on-demand resources, to be downloaded as needed. These assets are temporarily stored on the device, and can be deleted if the system needs more room. This allows that 32GB of space to be used very efficiently for games that are currently being played, and allows the game to download quickly so users don’t have to wait hours and hours for installation.

Consider again Batman: Arkham Knight. Of that 45GB of total space required, how much of it is needed at any time? The game takes approximately 15 hours to complete, and if you go through the extra levels, it takes 25 hours. If you never play the extra levels and additional content, there is no need to ever download them. While you are playing the first levels, the operating system is downloading the next levels in the background so they are ready when you are. When you move to level 3, level 2 can be safely deleted, ready to download again if your little brother decides to play. When bugs are found, the patches will be smaller. When new levels are added to the game, they are available when the player needs them. The entire experience is streamlined to make use of the local device storage and the cloud, seamlessly.

Apple has completely changed the music and video retail industries. They have completely changed the handheld gaming market, and the cell phone market. They are positioning themselves to change the TV market, and if I were Sony and Microsoft, I’d be worried they are going after the console market as well.

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The post How Apple is fixing what’s wrong with console gaming today appeared first on Apple TV Hacks.

Over the past couple of years, Apple has been slowly adding content, via ‘channels’, to the Apple TV platform. These channels are nothing more than a link on a homepage pointing to a third-party’s streaming web service, allowing Apple to quickly add and remove content providers via an update to their server-side HTML. As Apple has been expanding their content, they have simultaneously been conspicuously silent on the device at their annual developers convention, and this year was no different.

Among a list of changes to iOS, OS X, and watchOS announced in San Francisco, not a word was said about rumored updates to the hardware Apple TV platform, and only a single mention of the device’s capabilities as a HomeKit controller was made.

Yet, reading between the lines, there were many announcements that show the potential of what an updated device and Apple TV service would look like.

• Search API and Siri- One of the biggest challenges with the current way Apple has been deploying ‘channels’ on the Apple TV has been searching content. Today, there is no way to search across the channels for available shows, yet the new API released for iOS provides access to this data. Combined with the new, more natural capabilities within Siri, this would be the most logical place for a TV interface to succeed where others have failed. Use natural language to search content maintained by each channel and content provider, and the biggest challenges facing video content usability are conquered.
• Metal & Games APIs – Apple continues to advance the capabilities and performance of their game APIs. Today’s updates allow game developers to create better games faster than ever, and with the Apple TV sharing similar hardware to the iPhone/iPad, it would seem to be a trivial effort to allow developers to write games that execute natively on the platform.

So this is obviously all conjecture at this point, but without any substantive narrative from Apple in years, we’re going to be left guessing for at least a while longer.

Also read: Apple Music coming to Apple TV this fall

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The post Reading between the lines of WWDC 2015 keynote appeared first on Apple TV Hacks.

I’ve been having a lot of issues lately with Netflix on my Apple TV and other iOS devices from home. On Apple TV, the most common outcome of launching Netflix was the dreaded “Netflix is currently unavailable” screen. It has gotten so bad that my kids keep asking to just watch Netflix on Roku!

Obviously if Netflix was running on Roku and computers, the problem wasn’t with Netflix themselves, and today I decided to break out Wireshark to see exactly what was happening when the Apple TV tried to load Netflix. I’ve written previously about how Apple TV handles ‘applications’, so this was halfway between trying to fix a problem and hopefully learning something new.

I configured port mirroring on my Ethernet switch so I could see traffic heading to and from the Apple TV (I keep my Apple TV’s wired if at all possible, saving wireless bandwidth for other devices). As my Airport Extreme, my Ethernet switch, and Apple TV devices are all in the same cabinet, this was fairly simple to accommodate.

The first thing I noticed is when I attempted to launch the Netflix app, the Apple TV would immediately do a DNS lookup for a netflix.com hostname, but did nothing from there for basically 50 seconds until the “currently unavailable” screen popped up. Very strange…

After doing some more digging, I discovered that this was NOT actually the case – the Apple TV was just switching to IPv6, which I had filtered out of my Wireshark view. I changed the filter to the MAC of the Apple TV, and could now see that something was happening after the DNS lookup, but that whatever was happening didn’t appear to be working very well. There were duplicate packets, and it appears the SSL connection never really got much past the TCP connection establishment before ending the connection.

So, now the question was, is this related to IPv6, or is something else broken with Netflix/Apple TV? I disabled IPv6 connection sharing on the Airport Extreme and tried again.

Success!

Netflix quickly loaded as if nothing had ever been wrong. Wireshark showed the difference – SSL connection is successfully negotiated without a problem.

I haven’t done a capture from the external side of the Airport as of yet to see what the ‘IPv6 Connection Sharing’ was breaking in the SSL stream, but there is obviously a bug somewhere. At this point, I’m content having things work again, and while troubleshooting SSL is a great Friday activity over beers, I think I’ll just binge watch some X-Files instead.

To disable IPv6 on your Airport, launch Airport Utility and go to Edit —> Internet —> Internet Options and uncheck the “Enable IPv6 Connection Sharing” box.

I have also had intermittent, and frustrating, issues with AirPlay either not connecting, taking a very long time to connect, or not working at all. Since making this change, I have had no AirPlay issues at all.

Be sure to follow Apple TV Hacks on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ for all the latest Apple TV-related news.

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WWDC 2014 is over, and noticeably absent from last week’s keynote and sessions was any mention of the Apple TV. For a billion dollar product, this silence from Apple means one of two things: it could mean the business isn’t important, or more likely, it could mean that there are big things coming that aren’t ready for public consumption. Taking the assumption for the moment that a mere billion dollars is important to Apple, let’s review the announcements made last week and see how they may apply to the Apple TV product line.

(Reading between the lines of Apple’s announcements is often very telling. For example, prior to the iPhone 5 announcement, at WWDC Apple announced “auto layout” for iOS apps. On its own, it was a well-received feature, but in light of different screen sizes of the rumored new iPhone models, that feature took on a whole new perspective.)

Announcements last week that show promise:

Metal

Possibly the most interesting announcement for future Apple TV potential is the announcement of Metal. Metal is a set of developer API’s that allow “bare metal” access to the full graphics capabilities of the underlying hardware.

The game demos that were shown were fairly incredible for an iPad, and showed the hardware that Apple ships is getting closer and closer to “console-level” graphics capabilities. Granted, the demo was shown on an iPad Air, which greatly out-performs the current Apple TV products, but the Apple TV is overdue for a hardware refresh.

With most consumer televisions supporting 1080 resolution, an Apple TV with equivalent hardware specs as the iPad Air would outperform the Air. Not until TV’s reach 4k resolution does a television surpass the Air’s resolution.

HomeKit

There was a fair amount of unsubstantiated rumor and buzz around HomeKit prior to the announcement, with some proclaiming that Apple would “own” the home automation market. Instead, what Apple did is much more powerful – they have created an underlying architecture and set of API’s that enable developers to standardize the interaction of their devices and integrate different vendors seamlessly.

The ability to control home alarms, thermostats, and lights is very powerful. Having the ability to leverage this information in your home from the largest screen you own would hopefully be an area of expansion as this technology is adopted, and combined with Siri would be an even more powerful offering.

Siri

There are a couple of interesting tidbits surrounding Siri. Obviously, expansions in supported languages and overall capabilities is always interesting, but also fairly expected. Song recognition would be a feature that could be interesting for home use, and the ability to purchase content via iTunes store lays even more groundwork.

But there is one feature that would be essential to have Siri become a core part of Apple TV. The announced “always on” feature is the one. “Hey Siri, let’s watch some football” would seem to be a very Apple-ish way of approaching the living room. It will be interesting to see if this feature moves to the TV.

Continuity and indoor location API’s

This announcement has the most “start into my crystal ball to see the future” around it. With Continuity, Apple is likely using Bluetooth LE (think iBeacon) capabilities in their devices to determine when you are typing an email on your iPad and walk up to your Mac, and transfer the document and state of one device to another.

Obviously this is a “cool” technology, but if you apply it to the Apple TV, the feature takes on a whole new perspective. Apple could expand this capability to allow you to transfer the viewing of a YouTube or iTunes video directly to the Apple TV rather than AirPlay it.

But even more interesting is the overall concept of location-awareness. If the Apple TV knew that your iPhone was in the room, when you launched the “Remote” app on your iPhone, it would pick the appropriate Apple TV rather than making you select.

AirPlay could default to the nearest device. Content on the TV could automatically be selected based on the current user. Age restrictions could be automatic based on the devices in range. Many, many possibilities.

Photos

Apple has “upgraded” their photos support from iOS devices, allowing photos to be hidden, storing all photos in the cloud, and streamlining the uploading and editing of cloud-based photos. As photos are already supported on the Apple TV using the current iCloud services, we can safely assume that the new capabilities will likely be supported as well.

Family Sharing that allows family members to share purchases from iTunes (music, movies, tv shows) and the App Store (games!), as well as a family calendar and photos looks very promising, too.

And let’s not forget that in iOS 8, AirPlay will use peer-to-peer to connect to the Apple TV, letting us share the content from the iOS device on the big screen much easier and faster.

Another WWDC, another year, and no Apple TV public API support. Yet Apple has continued to lay more and more groundwork so that if, and hopefully when, they do open up the Apple TV to developers, it will be with a set of mature and extensive capabilities.

Be sure to follow Apple TV Hacks on Twitter, Facebook or Google+ for all the latest Apple TV-related news.

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Amazon has finally released their home TV set-top device, the Fire TV. With the same price and a similar form factor to the Apple TV, Amazon has joined Roku in their fight for the living room. But how does their offering stack up, and should Apple be worried?

The Specs

Apple’s current offering uses the A5 processor, the same chip in the iPhone 4S, a single-core processor with 512MB RAM. Amazon’s entry is built around a quad-core chip with 2GB of RAM. Clearly, the age of the Apple TV is showing, so from a capabilities and performance perspective, Amazon has the clear edge here. In practice, however, there are minimal expected differences is audio/video content performance, as both devices support 1080p and surround-sound audio. Amazon has raised the stakes a bit with their direct support of on-device games, where the additional CPU and GPU performance can be a major benefit.

A remote is included that stylistically, and thankfully, borrows heavily much more from Apple TV or Roku than the earlier Google TV offerings (remember the Sony remote?). It is much more substantial than the Apple remote, which may help keep it from getting lost in the sofa cushions on a daily basis (a real issue I have with the Apple TV remote). The remote has one additional very interesting feature…

Voice Search

By holding a button on the remote, you can activate Fire TV’s voice search function. Rather than having a remote with a full keyboard, making text entry easy but everything else difficult. Apple’s approach has as many tradeoffs, with general usage easy for a child to do but text entry frustratingly difficult. By integrating voice search directly into the remote, the Amazon approach has another clear leg up on the competition.

Games

Home gaming is in a very interesting state right now. With Sony and Microsoft releasing their fourth-generation home gaming consoles, the high end has never had the level of performance and capability as is available today. Nintendo has fumbled with their Wii-U product, and is struggling to find their feet. And now Amazon has entered the fray by providing a set-top box for a price the fraction of the Sony and Microsoft offerings, with a dedicated gaming controller available for under $40.

The hardware capabilities of the Fire TV, while significant for a streaming device, pale in comparison to the high-end offerings from MS and Sony. And with 8GB of storage on the Fire TV, it is unlikely that a truly immersive gaming experience is in the cards for this device. The ability to play Android games is the true unknown here, and could make the Fire TV a very compelling platform for low-end home gaming. Amazon is also creating their own games, starting with “Sev Zero,” from Amazon Game Studios.

Again, Amazon has a lead over Apple with their current offerings. The ability to play games natively on the device, and to provide an App Store for the games, is not something that Apple has done yet (however, the Apple TV 4 is rumored to come with its own App Store). We don’t yet know how the games or platform will be received, but for the Android gaming community, this has the potential to open up a new market for their enjoyment.

The Real Key: Content

Here is what the whole device market comes down to at its core: content. There are three different models being used for content today.

Roku has taken the most agnostic approach, by primarily relying on third-party content providers. While Roku does offer “M-Go” for direct movies, their primary focus is on providing as many different sources of content as possible, and they currently have over 1,000 “channels” available.

Apple has, unsurprisingly, focused on iTunes as their primary content delivery mechanism. As more and more content types moved to the cloud, the Apple TV became a more capable device, allowing any past purchases of movies, TV shows, and music, to be available at any time without requiring a local computer or copy of iTunes running. Apple has been slowly adding support for additional “channels,” but are nowhere near the 1,000 mark of Roku.

Apple has also opened up the Apple TV to some competitors in the content space, allowing Netflix and Hulu on the device, but Amazon Prime Instant Video is still absent. It is unknown if the absence of Amazon Prime is due to Apple, Amazon, or neither pushing for support.

Amazon is clearly positioning the Fire TV as an Amazon-service preferred device. While their current website and promotional materials list “Netflix” before “Prime Instant Video” in their list of content providers, this is likely due to the current marketshare of Netflix rather than an indication of Amazon’s future plans.

Both Netflix and Amazon have been heavily fighting for both exclusive content deals and original content over the past several months. With the success of Netflix’s “Hose of Cards” and “Orange is the New Black”, they have matured from a replacement for syndicated reruns to a potential legitimate competitor for HBO or Showtime. Likewise, Amazon’s recent success with “Alpha House” has encouraged them to make further investments in original content.

By owning the end-user device responsible for delivering their new content, Amazon has something that has never existed before in the video entertainment space – a true end-to-end experience. In the past, the content providers were reliant on the cable company for the set-top box, and Netflix has relied on third-party devices for the TV interface as well. This certainly has advantages for Amazon over Netflix.

Where Next?

The danger here is one of a new generation of incompatible formats and choices that hinder the end-user experience rather than foster it. Apple’s “walled garden” approach to content and applications means that long-term iTunes customers need to purchase their hardware to access their content, a story that has been consistent from the original iPod. Apple has been opening up access since the introduction of the iPhone SDK in February of 2008, allowing competing content providers to support Apple devices, but never allowing competing devices to access Apple/iTunes content.

Amazon has provide Prime streaming support on Roku, and will obviously provide it on Fire TV, but they have not made it available (or not been allowed to make it available) on the Apple TV. This only hurts the customer, and hopefully will be a short-term problem. With the technology available today, there is no reason the TV devices from every vendor shouldn’t support the top streaming services.

Apple certainly has a vested interest in not opening up their content libraries to other hardware providers, but hopefully Apple and Amazon can come to an agreement that is in the best interest of their mutual customers regarding streaming services.

Amazon has raised the bar in several areas, and are showing some real advancement in terms of the “living room experience.” Apple TV is sorely overdue for an update, and it will be interesting to see Apple’s response.

Also read: 

• Will Apple TV 4 come with Comcast subscriptions?
• Opinion: How Apple can improve the TV experience without the “TV”
• Opinion: Where is Apple taking the TV in 2014?

Be sure to follow Apple TV Hacks on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ for all the latest Apple TV-related news.

The post Amazon releases Fire TV: should Apple be worried? appeared first on Apple TV Hacks.

Over the weekend, the WSJ reported that Apple and Comcast are working on a deal to streamline the use of Apple TV to Comcast users, where Comcast would provide the bandwidth to the device via a different ‘channel’, allowing the Apple TV content to be protected from the buffering and quality issues that plague other video services relying on the public internet. This is in sharp contrast to the recent Netflix-Comcast deal, whereby Netflix is directly paying Comcast for bandwidth to Comcast’s customer base.

There are three fundamental issues that come into play with delivering cable television to the home, and this type of arrangement between Apple and Comcast could end up being mutually beneficial in each of these areas.

‘The Pipe’

The capabilities and options to deliver TV to the home depend largely on the infrastructure in place. The historical approach to video was to deliver an analog ‘broadband’ connection, where all TV channels are simultaneously transmitted to every home. The intelligence of which channel to display from that stream of all channels was left to the STB – set top box – that connects the TV to the cable network. In order for advanced services like time-shifting or pay-per-view to function in this type of environment, the majority of the intelligence was sitting on top of the customer television set.

As digital cable has expanded and become ubiquitous, the supporting infrastructure has evolved. In systems like AT&T’s U-Verse, the ‘full stream’ of cable channels are no longer sent to the home simultaneously. Instead, only the channels being watched or recorded are sent, down the same pipe that the home internet uses. The difference is that a portion of this bandwidth is reserved for the ‘TV’ portion of the traffic, and is protected from bittorrent, Netflix, and other internet traffic.

With Netflix using approximately 1/3 of all internet traffic, this becomes a huge sticking point for them to grow. A single Netflix HD stream uses approximately 7 Mb/s of bandwidth, and this bandwidth comes out of the customer’s ‘pool’ of bandwidth. Assuming Apple delivers similar quality, Comcast could colocate the servers delivering this content directly on their network and provide this bandwidth over their reserved ‘TV’ bandwidth, guaranteeing this bandwidth available to their customers regardless of whether or not everyone else in the neighbourhood is streaming Netflix or going crazy on bittorrent.

In order for Netflix to deliver a consistent and high-quality experience to their customers, they have decided to compensate Comcast directly for their bandwidth usage, and provide direct connections from their servers into the Comcast network, but their bandwidth is in no way guaranteed, and can and will be impacted by the number of simultaneous users and what they are doing.

This does bring up some interesting questions around net neutrality. However, it is not unreasonable to think that Comcast has an obligation to their customers to deliver a quality television experience, and providing reserved bandwidth is likely the only way to accomplish this. As long as the rest of their internet traffic isn’t filtered or prioritized in a way that unfairly punishes or rewards competitors, they may be able to steer clear of these issues since their customers are paying for television service as a separate, although bundled, service.

 ‘The Smarts’

With the cable companies acting like the slow-moving behemothly monopolistic utilities they are, companies like TiVo came to help give the end user a more intelligent and capable experience. This was a requirement in the old days of analog cable and over-the-air television, and has largely remained in place today. Even in the case of smarter television systems, the hard drive storing the buffered television usually sits in the STB. Really advanced systems can share this hard drive between different receivers, but the intelligence is still contained in the home.

This is not an ideal situation for anyone for many, many reasons. Hard drives fail, people don’t provide a clean, temperature-stable environment for the hardware, and the traditional vendors haven’t always prioritized end-user experience, or even been able to spell end-user experience, leading to a very frustrating customer experience.

For Comcast, the concept of having their end-user experience defined by Apple may be appealing. Apple has created a device that is inexpensive at $99, and that could conceivably provide a much better user experience than what exists today. The biggest problem with the Apple model is that it relies on a very intelligent cloud to deliver the content, and the cable companies have historically operated on the exact opposite of this model.

For Comcast to replace their user experience with Apple TV, they would have to create a very significant internal server infrastructure to deliver live content to millions of users. Luckily, the migration to digital and intelligent television has already accomplished a significant amount of this upgrade, but the DVR/time-shifting capabilities still primarily exist in the home today, and this capability would have to be moved to Comcast’s data centers.

When looking at the infrastructure Apple has been investing in for their content delivery networks, a reasonable theory to consider is that they may be preparing either a reference infrastructure for the cable companies or even preparing to host a significant amount of the infrastructure themselves, and just put in a pipe to the cable providers’ networks.

‘The Content’

Most of the recent rumors and discussions on Apple’s difficulties in entering the home TV market have centered around content contractual issues, and with good reason. The cable companies have used every legal option at their disposal to maintain their stranglehold monopoly over their users. One of the most effective ways of doing this is to “own” the content and channel broadcast rights for their user base. These contractual ties are so tight that as many content providers have created iOS, Apple TV, and Android apps, they are only available with full functionality to cable subscribers.

While this is likely not a viable long-term strategy to stop the ‘cord-cutters’, it certainly is a significant impediment to going cable-free in the short term. If you enjoy broadcast television, premium cable, or nearly any sporting events, you must have a subscription to cable TV to legally view the content through the network’s own applications.

By partnering with the cable companies, Apple sidesteps this issue for the time being. If Comcast is ‘just another app’ on the Apple TV, THEY are responsible for the contractual obligations, and they already likely have all of the necessary rights. Nothing in the Apple TV ecosystem is fundamentally that different from how cable content is delivered today, and will likely fall within the current contracts or require minimal changes.

Long-term, it is likely the content providers will move more ‘upstream’ and the premium channels will market directly to their consumers like Netflix does today, but that is many years and many contract renegotiations away. Today, cable is the in the driver’s seat.

The Biggest Winner: Everyone

Comcast wins because their customers get a better user experience, and they are paid whether the user is watching their cable content, a movie on Netflix, or buying a movie on iTunes.

Apple wins because they own the living room, which is all they really want in the first place.

Netflix wins because every home with an Apple TV installed, they have another device with their app available.

This may be the wave of the future, and the biggest losers would be the current STB providers. Based on how terrible their products are, will anyone care?

Also read:

• Will Apple TV 4 come with Comcast subscriptions?
• Opinion: How Apple can improve the TV experience without the “TV”
• Opinion: Where is Apple taking the TV in 2014?

The post Opinion: Netflix, Comcast and Apple – Two different approaches appeared first on Apple TV Hacks.

In the current incarnation of the Apple TV, Apple has created an install base of tens of millions of incredibly powerful devices, essentially a stealth army of living room soldiers awaiting orders. Here are some ways Apple could leverage the existing devices to transform the living room experience, without trying to sell a 40” or larger TV set.

Apps

Apple has historically taken a very evolutionary and iterative approach to supporting third-party applications on their platforms. The initial release of the iPhone did not allow third-party apps, and in fact did not open that capability up until a year after the initial release. During this time, Apple developed their API and accompanying tools internally, allowing them to mature before making them available to outside developers. From that initial support in iOS version 2, Apple has added more and more functionality to developers, with each new iOS release providing additional capability.

Similarly, the Apple TV platform initially had all ‘channels’ as built-in applications, but over time has expanded to allow third-party content dynamically. Due to the limited flash memory on the Apple TV (8GB), it is unlikely to support full App Store functionality in the current hardware incarnations. Rather than allowing applications to be run locally on the Apple TV, there are two possible options: Apple will allow applications to be run on the Apple TV but will cache them, either on a local devices (Mac) or via the cloud.

The second, and more likely, option based on current hardware is to continue to utilize and refine AirPlay, requiring an iPhone/iPad/iPod or Mac to actually “run” the game while utilizing the Apple TV as the conduit to display video on the living room TV.

In order for Apple to support native apps on the Apple TV, more flash memory will be required, and with the size of the current install base of Apple TV’s, it would be very atypical of Apple to obsolete all of those devices in such short order. A more likely scenario would be to ship 2-3 generations of new Apple TV devices with larger flash storage before opening up ‘native’ application functionality.

Channels

As recently profiled on Apple TV Hacks, Apple has built a very structured method for dynamically deploying new channels to the Apple TV. This is a huge shift in the Apple model for content deployment, which on the iPhone/iPad requires an update to either the operating system or an app. By basing the Apple TV channels on dynamically-generated web content, the core Apple TV menu is more like the iTunes store where content can be added and removed at will without any user interaction.

As Apple signs contracts with the content providers, there is little delay in adding content and no user actions required. Apple, through a hashing/signing function, still retains the “approval” mechanism they have built in to the iOS and Mac app stores, but the content providers have the ability to modify their content at their will.

iBeacon

One of the more interesting technologies being deployed in ball parks, stores, and even cars, is Apple’s Bluetooth-based iBeacon. Essentially, iBeacon allows compatible devices to broadcast a signal that tells you how close you are to the iBeacon.

For homes with multiple Apple TV devices, this could allow the remote app on an iPhone to work on the ‘nearest’ Apple TV or Mac, rather than requiring you to select the device you want to control, as it works today. For any wide-scale adoption of a true living room experience, the act of launching the remote app and picking which device you want to control is very non-Apple like. With iBeacon, this experience could be streamlined and close to 100% accurate.

In short, Apple has a very capable install base and the potential to make significantly more use of that install base through software updates. Many of the other predictions for Apple TV, whether they be app support or an actual TV set, require significant hardware upgrades which would make the current install base worthless. The real key is to figure out how Apple will leverage what is already in place to transform the living room like they did music sales and handheld gaming.

Also read: Where is Apple taking the TV in 2014?

Be sure to follow Apple TV Hacks on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ for all the latest Apple TV-related news.

The post Opinion: How Apple can improve the TV experience without the “TV” appeared first on Apple TV Hacks.

Have you ever wondered how Apple adds new content to the Apple TV without an update? For those of us with iPhones and iPads, every new application requires either a download or software update before being available. What is done differently in the Apple TV?

In the rest of the iOS world, icons on the home screen typically refer to an application – tapping the icon launches an actual app installed on the phone, whether that app is provided by Apple in the operating system (Phone, Messages, Stocks, etc.) or is installed via the app store (Angry Birds). An application in the iOS world is a complete set of all files required – the actual application executable, artwork images, data files – and is installed on the device and invoked when you tap the icon. Apple TV is very different – so different I’m going to refer to the icons on the Apple TV home screen as channels. They are NOT a full application – they are, in most cases, an icon with a link to a remote URL.

All of the channels on the Apple TV come from a file that is fetched over the internet. This file, called ‘storefront’, contains definitions for all of the channels except ‘Settings’ and ‘Computers’. If you boot an Apple TV without an internet connection, these are the only two icons you will see. Inside this storefront file are the definitions for the  structure and menus for the Movies, Music, TV Shows, and Podcasts sections of the iTunes store (hence the file named storefront). Additionally, all of the additional third-party channels are defined in this file. For a channel, the storefront file contains the menu title (Weather, Yahoo Screen, Netflix), links to the artwork for the icon at both 720 and 1080 resolutions, and a link to a javascript URL that hosts the actual ‘code’ for the channel.

As such, the Apple TV is very different than the rest of the iOS family of devices. The content on the home screen is dynamically generated, and will rarely require a software update to add content. New channels can be added by Apple simply by modifying the storefront file. The channel providers can likewise modify their channel content and functionality at any time, since the javascript is loaded only when you click on the channel. (Note: Apple includes a signature of the javascript in their storefront file, providing additional security. This would suggest that Apple has some type of approval process in place for channel updates, similar to how apps are approved on other iOS devices for inclusion in the App Store.)

Apple’s ‘built-in’ channels are the exception to this. The iTunes store channels for Movie, TV, Music, and Podcasts have their menus dynamically defined in the storefront file, but other Apple channels appear to be special cases as well.

Some of the more recent Apple channels follow the same structure as the other third-party channels. Trailers and iMovie Theater are defined just like the other third-party channels, with a link to a javascript file on a remote server. The older Apple-provide channels, namely Radio (internet radio stations), Photo Stream (now iCloud Photos), YouTube, and Flickr, are defined in the storefront file but do not have a link to a remote javascript file. This would indicate that the functionality of that channel is built into the software image. The final special case is iTunes Radio, which is a newer channel, but likely required special software for full functionality, and as such appears to be built into the image as well.

One of the more interesting things about the different channels on the Apple TV is that the methodology for adding content has changed over the years the device has been available. Most of the older channels are not dynamically generated, while all of the newer third-party channels are, and even some of the newer Apple-provided channels use this ‘javacript-on-a-remote-server’ approach. This would indicate that Apple has been evolving their approach to content on the Apple TV since its introduction, and are moving toward a more dynamic model to provide and update content, avoiding unnecessary software updates if possible. There have also been significant changes to how they validate and secure this content, which is necessary when so much content is dynamically generated.

The mix of static and dynamic content makes the Apple TV a very interesting device – Apple can immediately add content as they sign deals with the content providers, and nothing is required from the end user to make this content available.

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The post How Apple adds new channels to Apple TV appeared first on Apple TV Hacks.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has been building out an extensive network of data centers and connections as groundwork for moving deeper into television. Today, Apple uses a mix of content that is hosted in Apple-owned data centers and content distribution from Level 3 and Akamai, which is a good strategy for more “static” content like what is currently available in the iTunes store. Essentially, Apple can push a copy of “Thor: The Dark World” to Akamai and let them provide the servers and bandwidth to all of the users who purchase the movie.

Where this model fails is when more interactive or real-time content is being viewed. If Apple is truly going to compete for living room space as the primary set-top device, the “Live TV” problem must be tackled. Verizon did a reasonably good job of this with the Super Bowl, streaming it live to a peak of 1.1 million viewers. Yet this was a paltry 1% of the total TV audience, and those viewers were often watching the game with a 20-30 second delay. This is problematic for almost any live event, and a deal-breaker when it comes to sporting events.

The fundamental problem is one of fairly simple math. Using the new “Thor” movie as an example, the bandwidth required for a single viewer of the 1080P stream is 4.5Mb/s, well within the realm of most broadband users in the U.S. Unlike “Thor”, however, Apple can’t ship a copy of the Super Bowl video to Akamai and let them handle streaming that 4.5Mb/s out to millions of users. The streaming needs to occur in as close to real-time as possible.

Apple approaches services like this from an evolutionary perspective. Downloading of music content was the first offering, and the infrastructure was scaled up, broke, fixed, and scaled some more. Then, standard definition video downloads were added. Scale, break, fix, scale. High definition video downloads. Scale, break, fix, scale. Then streaming of static content, both music and video. In this process, they have undoubtably learned many lessons about how to build and manage the infrastructure required to support large-bandwidth events, whether it’s a new movie or the release of iOS 7. And they have learned is what they can use partners like Akamai and Level 3 for, and what they cannot.

Being the control freaks they are, it would be surprising if they continued to rely on Akamai for such a large portion of their user experience, and even more surprising if they believed that a 20-30 second delay for something like the Super Bowl would be acceptable to their users. The only solution to this is to build out the infrastructure themselves, allowing them to produce and deliver the content with as little latency as possible to as many users as possible, while still meeting their goals for quality and performance.

The WSJ article certainly lends credence to this. Apple has 20 million Apple TV’s sold to date, and another 700 million iOS devices. Whatever they build has to support this volume of users. For Apple to handle just 10% of the Super Bowl viewers via Apple TV would require a staggering 45 Terabits of data per second, all of that delivered in a manner that is at least comparable in quality and latency to what users receive today from their cable provider. From the sounds if it, they are preparing to do just that.

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The post WSJ: Apple quietly building its own content delivery network as possible groundwork for television appeared first on Apple TV Hacks.

Yesterday Apple released their 2013 Q4 numbers and spoiler alert – they sold a lot of stuff. Specifically, they sold a lot of iPhones, iPads, iPods, Macs, and iTunes content, providing specific sales numbers for each of these categories. What wasn’t detailed is how many Apple TV’s were sold.

Very little is done without a reason at Apple, and the lack of clear communication surrounding the Apple TV may well be strategic. The last announcement of Apple TV sales was in May 2013 at the D11 conference, when Tim Cook stated that 13 million had been sold, with half sold in the prior year. Eight months have passed, and assuming the sales have held somewhat steady, it’s difficult to see how Apple can justify calling a product that has sold in the neighborhood of $2 billion a “hobby.” So why the silence?

Perhaps it’s time for Apple to “disrupt” the television space. If that is the plan, they are doing it in a classic Apple way, quietly building an installed base of around 20 million Apple TV’s. While that number pales in comparison to the number of iPhones, iPads, and iPods, it is a fairly significant number of larger screens. Let’s put it in perspective:

The top 5 US cable companies are:

Based on market share (numbers of subscribers)
Currently – January 2013 (numbers are approximate)

1. Comcast Corp.: 23 million
2. Time Warner Cable: 12 million
3. Cox Communications: 4.595 million
4. Verizon: 4.592 million
5. AT&T: 4.3 million

[source: Wikipedia]

Apple now has nearly the power of Comcast in terms of subscribers to their television service, and just like they did with music, they are going to the content producers instead of the retailers. Think of PBS, ABC, Disney, and HBO as analogous to the music labels, and Comcast and TW are today’s Blockbuster Video. Give the customers what they want, at a reasonable price, and remove players that add no value.

Everyone hates their cable company. Everyone. They are “safe” today for one reason and one reason only – most of the content producers are contractually tied to only offer much of their content only to paid cable subscribers. That is why most of the Apple TV “networks” require you to sign in to AT&T or COX before you can view live content, although we are seeing a trend to offer more and more content without this login requirement where possible.

As Apple reaches critical mass, they will have the same negotiating power that Comcast has, and those contractual handcuffs will fall by the wayside. The content producers will quickly realize that, in order for them to survive, they can’t ignore 20 million TV’s and 700 million smaller iOS screens that Apple brings to the table. Those numbers make Comcast seem pretty insignificant in comparison, and if they aren’t scared, they should be.

The other disrupting force in this market is Netflix. By provoking exclusively on-demand content, and branching out into original productions, Netflix has grown to 33.4 million subscribers, certainly giving HBO and Showtime pause. Netflix is able to build a direct relationship with its customers, and leverage rapidly evolving technology to satisfy their early-adopter customers and support 4K years before the cable TV companies will have upgraded their infrastructure. The combination of Apple TV and Netflix will force HBO and Cinemax to make changes to their business model, and that combined pressure will become an unstoppable force forward.

Apple has created a premium market and product suite for entertainment. Music, movies, books, and casual games exist on large part with Apple as one of, if not the, primary market and source of revenue for many developers and content producers. To date, Apple has limited Apple TV gaming to AirPlay from another iOS device or, more recently, OS X. So the final interesting possibility here is the A7 chip and it’s 64-bit capabilities. Few would argue that the iPhone 5S and iPad Air are unable to make full use of this chips possibilities, primarily due to power and space concerns. When these constraints are removed, the gaming possibilities of this platform become very interesting as well. Rumors are circulating, as they have before, that Apple is going to release an Apple TV SDK and open the platform to developers.

Apple has been quietly adding select content providers to their Apple TV ecosystem. This has allowed them to accomplish a few specific goals: stay under the radar of the cable providers, allow the device to gain more marketshare and approach that “critical mass,” and mature their API in infrastructure. There is a very big difference between selling a 4-minute song and streaming live video to tens of millions of devices. But don’t think for a second they they don’t have a plan and that they will, as they have done time and time again, disrupt an entire industry in the guise of releasing a product.

It’s what they do.

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