14 DAY TRIAL // According to Statista's newly published analysis of the online video market, the annual video streaming and downloads revenue is expected to grow by more than $6 billion from 2014 to 2020 in the United States.
Coupled with the September 9 event that's just around the corner, this is a huge opportunity for Apple to get the bigger bite before other video streaming services like Amazon and Netflix solidify their position.
Although it hasn't yet made any public references to a possible future online video streaming service of its own, there are a lot of signs that Apple might do just that, mainly to make Apple TV the hub of a new online video delivery platform.
To this date, though, Apple has not yet made any public acquisitions of companies of software products capable of acting as a base for an "Apple Video" service of sorts, or as a substitute for months (it not years) of research and development for such a platform.
Hints of a potential "Apple Video" have surfaced in the past year
However, in the last three years, Apple has worked hard on improving user experience with online services on their software and hardware platforms. This is quite obvious if one stops for a minute and decides to overview all of Apple's acquisitions in this period and the impact they had on the final products released to the public.
In spite of this fact, there still are signs of a potential new Apple service focused on delivering original video content. One of them is Variety's report that, a few months ago, Apple tried to hire the Top Gear team after it left the BBC show, only to be outbid by Amazon who signed an exclusive deal with Clarkson, Hammond and May for a new show on Amazon Prime.
Apple expanding their multimedia delivery platform with a potential Apple Video service is not a bad idea at all, considering the huge boost this market is poised to get in the coming years.
Apple can take advantage of huge opportunities and has enough money to do it
If we were to speculate on what Apple will unveil at the September 9 event as their "one more thing," we'd put our money on a completely revamped Apple TV box, with at least one channel of original Apple video content and, why not, support for multiple TV streaming services.
One other possible happy outcome would be a deal between Apple and one of the major online streaming services (Netflix or Hulu), if not the acquisition of any one of them, seeing that Apple has deep enough pockets to do it.