News - 22/09/2014

Beats Music app on Apple TV: where does this leave the competition?

Beats Music app on Apple TV: where does this leave the competition?


Just as everyone’s heads were turned towards the Apple Watch, the new iPhones and U2’s controversial album roll-out Apple quietly added a Beats Music app to its TV boxes in the United States (Beats Music is not yet available internationally).

The Apple TV continues to be a strange device: the company rarely talks about it, rumours about an new TV set from Cupertino have died down but still new apps keep appearing periodically.

The Apple Watch already has an SDK available for developers to create apps, whilst Apple has yet to launch a full-blown ecosystem for its TV product. This means that the number of apps that appear is severely restricted to, well, the ones the company wants to see there.

Beats is now part of Apple so it’s only natural to see a dedicated app make its way to the set, but this raises questions as to why the apps of services like Spotify, Rdio or Deezer didn’t appear beforehand.

Apple - as demonstrated by the U2 stunt - wants to preserve its position of dominance in the music space, and that whilst it couldn't reject applications from streaming services on its iOS platforms it can still control what appears on Apple TV.

But can the Apple TV can survive for much longer without supporting third party apps? Will we see an updated box before Christmas? At the moment there’s not much to go on - not even rumours - to answer these questions but their answer will be important to figure out if Apple is simply giving Beats Music a leg-up or if there is a longer-term plan to keep competing music streaming services out of the living room of Apple fans.


(Andrea Leonelli)

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