Smart Screen Exclusive

By Paul Sweeting

Apple will hold its fall media event on September 9th, where it is expected to unveil an array of new hardware, including a new iPhone 6S and 6S Plus. One item that apparently will not be on the agenda, however, is the launch of Apple’s long-awaited over-the-top subscription video service.

According to multiple reports, which Apple has not tried to shoot down, Apple has pushed back the launch until sometime in 2016 as it continues to negotiate with the TV networks over streaming rights and other elements of the system.

That doesn’t mean there will be no interesting TV news,  however. In addition to the new iPhone hardware Apple is widely expected to introduce the next generation of its Apple TV set-top box that will feature a number of significant upgrades.

According to the usually well-sourced 9to5 Mac, the new version will be the first to run a full-blown iOS core, in this case a TV-optimized version of iOS 9, powered by the same A8 CPU in the latest iPhones.

From a hardware and OS perspective, the new Apple TV, slimmer and slightly wider than previous versions, essentially will be an iPhone on the set-top, capable of doing anything an iPhone can do, short of making phone calls.

Apple will also reportedly release a TV SDK, opening the platform for the first time to third-party developers.

The SDK and iOS core are good news for developers because they already know how to develop for the platform and it will make apps more easily portable from one device to the other, allowing developers to stitch together the set-top and mobile experience in ways they haven’t been able to before.

The full iOS 9 core could add a number of other capabilities to Apple TV, however, including support for Siri and for Proactive search.

Apple introduced Proactive with the rollout of iOS 9 earlier this year in response to Microsoft’s Cortana and Google’s Google Now.  It allows a device to search across different buckets of data, such as apps, contacts, maps and calendars to surface relevant information from one application while using another. If a user has a calendar appointment coming up, for instance, a map view can appear with an estimated arrival time, directions, and a time to leave indicator based on traffic. Proactive is also able to trigger push notifications to help the user avoid missing calendar events.

Though designed as an enhancement to Siri, the capabilities of Proactive could also be the foundation of a pretty interesting discovery and recommendation engine on Apple TV.

Using Proactive search, an Apple TV user could, in principle, search for “James Bond” and be shown results from the iTunes Store, Netflix, Crackle and whatever other services they have on the device. Because Proactive is part of the operating system, it would already have access to the data in those apps, including profile information, favorites and previously viewed titles, as well as the metadata associated with them, without needing APIs. Thus, the Apple TV could potentially surface content from one app while the user is viewing similar content in another.

Whether Apple has plans to actually enable that sort of discovery, of course, is unknown at this point. 9to5 Mac speculates that Apple wouldn’t activate something like that until Apple TV is well-populated with third-party apps, which sounds reasonable. As a threshold matter, though, will have the hardware and OS capabilities to support much more robust search and discovery tools that it has had up to now.