YouTube Comes to Apple TV
Speaking at the D Conference, Steve Jobs today announced YouTube videos will be included on the Apple TV. Holy user-generated validation!
Om was live-blogging the speech for GigaOM when Jobs announced that YouTube had made its way to the living room:
“We got this working, and we watched a ton of this stuff. It turned out to be pretty cool. You search from the interface and you can find a lot of things through that. You get what you get, it’s amazing how fun these things are.”
When the Apple TV first was announced, we at NewTeeVee had snarked that it did not include one of the most exciting emerging kinds of video: that not created by professionals. “Over at Moscone,” we said in January, “it was all about John Mayer, Pirates of the Caribbean, the Office, and Zoolander.” Well, down in Carlsbad, that seems to have changed.
We had previously pointed to hacks that got YouTube onto Apple TVs through unofficial means.
Jobs also claimed today that the lack of features on the Apple TV is, well, a feature.
We can’t replace the set-top box. You have to go through the cable companies. We didn’t do it, and do a go to market strategy like that. We didn’t have to replace set-top box. We have to be the DVD player for the Internet age.
And this new-fangled DVD player is going to show not just your own home movies, but those of the whole world.
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Of course, Apple TV hackers have been watching YouTube and other vids for ages now!
From the release, it won’t be YouTube’s entire catalogue at first. This is total speculation, but what I think is slowing that down is that YouTube will be re-transcoding the uploaded source videos into a format that’s more appropriate for the Apple TV. Since the current quality of YouTube videos would look really terrible on a larger screen.
It also raises the question, for me, of why the Apple TV requires you to download movies to a computer, and then to the device. Will YouTube videos go directly to the Apple TV? And will they be streamed, or downloaded and saved?
Jackson West on May 30th, 2007 at 10:02 pm - Permalink
[...] and the living room, otherwise it could slowly start losing traction to new devices like Apple TV. Apple recently introduced a new YouTube channel on [...]
NewTeeVee » TiVo aims For Mass Market on May 31st, 2007 at 11:37 am - Permalink