Apple is not saying much publicly about its plans for television, other than that it is an area of “intense interest.” But it appears that movement is still happening inside the company.
The latest evidence is the hiring of a former executive of CableLabs, a company that develops cable television technologies, as an engineering director. The executive, Jean-Francois Mulé, worked at CableLabs as an executive of technology development, where he developed software that measured the quality of video transferred over cable Wi-Fi networks, according to his LinkedIn business profile. In the profile, he described his new job at Apple as being “part of something big.”
Kristin Huguet, an Apple spokeswoman, declined to comment. Multichannel, a news site that covers cable TV, first reported Mulé’s hiring.
Apple also recently hired an executive at Hulu, Pete Distad, as a product marketer.
For years, there have been whispers that an Apple television is in the works, but one has yet to be introduced. With some past media players Apple has introduced, the company also had a service to put content on the devices.
The iPad, for example, was introduced simultaneously with the iBookstore, which included several partnerships with big book publishers. Apple has been pursuing partnerships with cable programmers and distributors, which has expanded the capabilities of its Apple TV set-top box and could possibly culminate into a full-blown television.
An earlier version of this post misstated the chronology of the debuts of the iPod and the iTunes store. The iPod was introduced before the iTunes store, not the other way around. (The iPod was introduced in 2001 and iTunes in 2003.)