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Despite Apple not having a presence at Consumer Electronics Show this week, it stole the limelight: Airplay and iTunes are coming to new TVs for the first time, a rare expansion of the company's walled garden.
My first reaction to the news that iTunes is coming was confusion, but upon further examination it's the iTunes brand grafted onto a new, subsection of the desktop app we all know: just movie and TV streaming.
For now, iTunes will launch exclusively with Samsung TVs, pre-loaded out of the box, and I'd expect that to expand later. For every other brand, Airplay 2 support is arriving in 2019, including those by Sony, Vizio, LG and others.
That's a huge move, given that Apple's streaming offering was previously limited to only the Apple TV and desktop iTunes. It's rare to see Apple services expand beyond its own walls to third-party platforms (if you had told me in 2018 that Apple would make a Tizen app, I would have laughed at you), and coming to TVs feels like an admission that Apple TV is simply not taking off.
With evidence that Apple is acquiring the rights to high quality TV shows and movies, the timing makes sense ahead of announcing whatever that service will become. It also helps guarantee a strong start, with access to millions of users on day one, out of the box, rather than needing to convince them to go buy a dedicated streaming widget.
All of this is great for the consumer: cross-platform movie rental and purchasing has been a huge pain historically, with little real competition and few incentives to compete on price. Today there's an array of disparate services, from Google Play Movies to Vudu, but iTunes stands apart in both its competitive pricing and not charging for higher-quality releases, such as 4K.
Airplay expanding so aggressively is interesting, too, because wherever there isn't iTunes, those with iPhones and iPads can just beam it to whatever TV they already own. Essentially, it's a rallying cry against Chromecast's dominance, which works with every device on the planet, while Airplay was a rather slow burn that few manufacturers adopted historically.
It's going to be an interesting year for the content business: everyone from Amazon to Google, Netflix, Disney and Apple is all-in on acquiring customers, exclusives and enough incentives to make you jump onto their streaming platforms. As of today, there's no clear winner, and consumer habits are still able to be molded.
What I'm waiting to see: will the streaming business redefine how people actually consume in the first place? When music streaming via Spotify became easier than piracy, stealing music cratered. Will the same happen here?
🍎 Apple brings iTunes to Samsung TVs (The Verge)
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