Apple announces new TV app for Apple TV, iPad and iPhone

While we were expecting an Apple TV refresh , the company has introduced a new TV app with will be available on the Apple TV, iPhone and iPad. The new app is said to offer a unified experience to discover and access TV shows and movies on one single platform.

“Using apps on Apple TV, iPhone and iPad has become the primary way for so many of us to watch television. The TV app shows you what to watch next and easily discover TV shows and movies from many apps in a single place,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services.

Some of the key highlights of the app include:

Watch Now Users will see their collection of available shows and movies from iTunes and apps. From Watch Now they can jump to Up Next or Recommended to choose what to watch.

Up Next TV shows and movies that a user is currently watching as well as iTunes rentals and purchases will be presented in the order they are most likely to watch first. For instance when a viewer finishes an episode, the next one will automatically appear at the start of the Up Next queue. This sounds a lot like Netflix.

Recommended Apple will offer viewers a large selection of curated and trending shows and movies which will be hand-picked by Apple’s curators, along with dedicated categories and genres.

Library As the name suggests this will be where users can access their entire collection of iTunes movies and TV shows that they have rented or purchased.

Store New content across video services which users have not yet downloaded or are not yet subscribed to, along with the latest releases on iTunes can be found here.

The new TV app will offer a syncing feature so if a user has multiple devices, they can resume playback on any of them.  This feature is available on many other streaming services including Netflix and YouTube.

Apple has also integrated Siri into the TV app. This allows users to tune into live news and sporting events. Siri will know about sports events so a user can simply ask the assistant to open up a match and a live stream will open up. We still however, need to check if it will be available in India and what all sporting events will be available. Similarly users can directly watch a live video by just saying the name of the app, for example “Watch CBS News” without having to navigate to the live stream from within the app.

The new TV app will be available in December as free software updates for Apple TV (4th generation), iPhone and iPad customers in the US. We are still awaiting details for India. The Siri Live Tune-in feature is said to be live but we will confirm the feature as it rolls out.