14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has added several new icons to its Apple TV home screen, including finance channel Bloomberg, ABC, Crackle, and Korea’s KORTV.
These are just the latest additions in a long stream of updates dating from as far back as June 2013, which started with WatchESPN and HBO GO. In August, Apple added Vevo, Smithsonian, and Disney, and later, in September, it threw in Major League Soccer and Disney Junior.
This week, the newest additions were made: ABC, Bloomberg, Crackle, and KORTV. The company is reportedly in talks with Time Warner Cable and The CW to launch additional channels.
According to people familiar with the development of the Bloomberg channel app, “Apple has already streamlined the process of building its current lineup of Apple TV apps— which mostly consist of streaming video content— to the point where developers can quickly and easy build apps through an easy to use SDK, much like on iOS.”
Only two programmers built the Bloomberg app in just five weeks, with 9to5mac noting that most of that time was dedicated to testing and optimizations. Practically, the app took mere days to create.
Apple’s toolkit for coding Apple TV apps is an SDK similar to the one found in Xcode for iOS and OS X. The toolkit has “made it quite easy to build the apps,” the duo said.
Apple is believed to have prepared a major new TV update for customers in 2014, which may include an all-new product with a big screen.
The company is slowly but steadily adding new content to its current-selling set-top box, bringing the cable industry’s reign to an end with each new channel added to its home screen.