14 DAY TRIAL // The CEO of video cloud company Brightcove, Jeremy Allaire believes Apple’s upcoming TV product will feature cable content via app subscription. He thinks there will be not one, but two products from Apple geared towards video. None of them will be full-fledged TVs, he said.
A belief shared by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, Allaire’s theory involves “partnerships with the top cable companies for them to open up their APIs for their EPG, VOD libraries and Network DVR infrastructure so that Apple can offer a superior user experience on top of those services.”
Writing a feature for All Things D, Allaire explains that such a model would enable customers to “purchase and use an Apple TV device [...] and use it in concert with an existing subscription from a TV operator, and access the TV functionality as an App."
"Yes, cable TV will just be an app among what will be tens and then hundreds of thousands of apps on your Apple TV,” he specifically said.
This has been echoed by many analysts, but few of them have tackled the cable-app idea.
He believes “...Apple will also release a TV monitor product as well with identical capabilities as the updated Apple TV add-on device, but in a design and form factor that presents the Apple brand effectively,” he wrote.
Allaire says there will be an additional Apple TV “add-on product [...], a thin black bar, perhaps 1 inch tall and 3 inches wide, that can easily mount to the top of almost any existing HD capable TV set.”
This device will also have much the same functionality as the current TV, as well as the same ports, “but it will also include a high-def camera built into it’s [sic] face, as well as an embedded iOS environment that provides motion-sensing and speech processing,” he believes.
Finally, the Brightcove CEO sees Apple releasing iOS updates with “significantly enhanced and improved AirPlay functionality” for video streaming.