The
First, and most persuasively, Apple just bought (and shut down) Matcha, a video discovery app. Matcha provided "smart aggregation and personalized recommendations around 250,000 titles from the most popular video services such as
There has been a lot written about novel interaction methods for the Apple TV, iWands, iRings, talking, eye tracking, waving your hands and, of course, using your iOS devices, but without really smart personalization, a smart TV cannot deliver a seamless user experience. So with Matcha, it would appear that Apple was watching the space, which includes Squrl, Fan and Dijit's NextGuide and many others, and made their move once a winner seemed to emerge.
In a similar move, Apple acquired app recommendation engine Chomp and then used it to remake the App Store in iOS 6 on it. In the case of Chomp, Apple kept the site going for almost a year after acquisition. Apple's use of the technology behind Siri followed a similar pattern.
Second, is the usual round of supply chain rumors, documented by The Register under the wonderful tabloid headline, "Apple big-screen TV rumor zombie RISES FROM THE DEAD." Economic Daily News from Taipei (see Google translation here) reports that "Apple has held talks in the US with representatives of
If Apple were to launch the next version of the Apple TV "puck" with Matcha's software (and the results of its recent deals with big media companies) in time for the holidays, might it also announce this stand-alone TV product at the same time? This would throw doubt into consumers' minds about buying a Samsung Smart TV this year and give them a reason to wait for the Apple iTV.
I would be inclined to agree with The Register's day of the dead assessment of the Apple TV rumors if it were not for a third little tidbit, this one from Google Ventures general partner MG Siegler on Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber's Talk Show podcast last week. Business Insider provided this transcription of his remarks (this is 1:27:00 into the podcast):
Not to go into rumor central here but the latest things like I've heard are some sort of television product — not necessarily a television screen but something — could be coming as soon as this November. And I think there's some surprises there about what it could actually be and I don't for sure what it could actually be but there's been whispers about, so I'm not going to write anything about it, but there's whispers out there that the interaction with it could be the interesting thing. People have talked about voice, but I think that's out the window and there might be some new way to interact with whatever this thing is.
Siegler has precisely gone into rumor central with this vague suggestion about "interaction," but it is interesting to put this together with the Matcha acquisition. Whatever the interaction method turns out to be (and odds are there will be multiple methods and perhaps even an SDK and APIs to address them) the choices offered need to be good choices for each user. This is why the Samsung Smart TV is not yet really smart. Waving your hand in front of a carousel of selections is only as good as those suggestions. A lot of the attention about the Apple TV or iTV has been about the explicit interactions (voice, gesture, etc.) that Steve Jobs said he had "cracked," but it may turn out that the implicit interactions that set the parameters of selection are even more crucial to the user experience.
Does Apple really have something on deck for November or are they planting rumors to drive us crazy? Any credible suggestion that there might be a product forthcoming is enough to depress sales of competing (existing) products, so this is a serious question. Replacing TV as we know it has turned out to be a harder problem than anyone anticipated. Apple wants to get it right, but the fans are restless.
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