Apple Reportedly Working on Universal TV Guide for Streaming Content Across iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV

BY Evan Selleck

Published 4 Aug 2016

Apple TV's tvOS

Apple has a focus on TV, even if plans to launch its own streaming packages have apparently fallen through for the time being.

According to a report from Recode, that plan has evolved — or at least one more plan has emerged in the whole process. The report states that Apple is currently in talks with a variety of content providers, from traditional networks to streaming platforms, to create a “universal guide” that would show users what’s available to watch, whether it’s a TV show or a movie.

The report notes that Apple is courting quite a few companies, but points out ESPN, HBO, and Netflix as primary targets. The goal here is apparently to draw in all of these content providers, and then let users see what’s available across all those services in a single user interface.

“Industry sources say Apple’s plans are an outgrowth of the TV service it wanted to launch last year. The difference is that in 2015, Apple wanted to sell TV programming directly to consumers and provide them with a new interface that would make it easy to find the stuff they paid for.

Now Apple is just working on the interface. It is letting programmers, distributors and customers work out the money part among themselves.

Apple laid out the first part of this plan in public in June at its WWDC event, when it announced a “single sign-on” plan that’s supposed to let pay TV customers access video programmers’ apps without having to continually provide logins and passwords. If pay TV distributors sign on to the plan, it would let users access and download multiple “TV Everywhere” apps more easily.”

As mentioned in the article, this appears to be a natural next step for Apple after it unveiled the “single sign-on” feature, which lets users of the fourth-generation Apple TV running tvOS just sign in once, and not have to sign in multiple times into various subscription services on the set-top box. That same feature extends to the iPad, too.

There’s no word on when something like this might launch, unfortunately.

[via Recode]