Apple’s been working to make the Apple TV “more than a hobby” for a long, long time now, but it looks like it won’t happen this year, with a new report saying that a new Apple TV — whether a full HDTV or a new set-top box with content deals from the cable system — definitely won’t happen this year.
About a month ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple was in talks with the biggest U.S. cable operators that would let them use their Apple TVs to stream live television and other content.
Bloomberg now reports that those talks don’t seem to be going well, with a source familiar with the company’s plans saying Apple “won’t be releasing a new TV product this year.”
Mostly, it appears that the cable operators — having learned a lesson about what happened to the music and telecom industries when they negotiated with Apple — don’t want to let Apple into the living room on anything but onerous terms, and Apple would rather not release a mediocre, crippled product (a la the GoogleTV) instead of revolutionizing it.
Source: Bloomberg
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
