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Apple TV 4K Falls Victim To Video Streaming Format War

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The long-awaited - by me, anyway - 4K-capable Apple TV box is finally here. Yes, after failing to cater for the already substantial installed 4K TV base with the fourth generation Apple TV two years ago, Apple has finally (as reported here) bitten the bullet and made its latest Apple TV capable of playing not just 4K-resolution streams, but high dynamic range (HDR) 4K streams. Unless, that is, those streams happen to be coming from the world’s biggest video streaming platform…

As some of us had feared would be the case, if you try and play a 4K HDR stream from YouTube, Apple TV 4K unceremoniously goes back to being plain old Apple TV. Ouch.

The reasons for this are tragically simple and all too familiar from recent AV history: YouTube streams its 4K/HDR content using a video compression format called VP9 that the new Apple TV 4K doesn’t support.

Photo: Apple

Apple revealed at its WWDC in June that it was adopting the HEVC video compression system for tvOS11 - a sure sign even then that the brand was readying a new 4K Apple TV box. However, HEVC is not compatible with VP9, so any 4K HDR content mastered in VP9 will default down to plain old standard dynamic range HD on devices that don’t support the format.

This same streaming format war initially caused headaches for many smart TV makers too, when 4K video streaming first became a thing. This is where things start to look a bit awkward for Apple, though, since the TV brands pretty swiftly realized that it wasn’t really on to have their customers missing out on a chunk of the world’s still-limited 4K content supply just because the video streaming world couldn’t settle on a single video format. So they very swiftly started making their TVs able to cope with both VP9 and HEVC.

In fact, smart TVs have now generally been format-neutral when it comes to video streaming for years now. So why can’t Apple TV 4K offer the same flexibility?

For starters, Apple has history here. Namely that you can’t play VP9 content on its iOS or macOS Safari browsers either. This is, perhaps, a holdover from when Apple tended to try and steer away from third-party and non-Apple open-source platforms.

Another option is that Apple just didn’t think to build support for the VP9 codec into the latest Apple TV box. It seems inconceivable, though, that Apple could have overlooked a video content source as vast as YouTube when putting its 4K HDR plans together - unless it’s somehow a limitation of the A10X chipset that powers the new ATV box.

Photo: Apple

This leaves Apple’s much-reported bad relationship with Google as seemingly the most likely reason there’s no 4K HDR YouTube support on the Apple TV 4K.

Reports of bad blood between Apple and Google have been doing the rounds since at least 2010, and while there’s a tendency for the press to exaggerate such tales of corporate fisticuffs, Apple does have history in this department too. After all, only recently has Apple been able to announce that an Amazon Video app is coming to Apple TV 4K, following a long-running dispute with Amazon over hardware sales.

If the lack of VP9 streaming support really is down to politics rather than technical oversight, I guess all we can do is hope that Apple’s eventual rapprochement with Amazon can soon be repeated with Google too.

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