As reported earlier this week, Apple had next to nothing to say about its Apple TV streaming box during its 2017 WWDC keynote speech.
All we heard then was official confirmation of something we already knew: that Apple TV was finally getting an Amazon Video app.
Since then, Apple has quietly revealed a few other tidbits about the next iteration of its tvOS platform - most of which are so dull it’s hardly surprising Apple didn’t bother mentioning them in the keynote. There is one newly revealed tvOS feature, though, which seems to me to have huge implications for the future of Apple’s now painfully outdated Apple TV product range: HEVC support.
Photo: Apple
It looks like we're finally going to get a 4K-capable Apple TV.
For those of you not familiar with it, HEVC is a third-party video compression system capable of reducing video streaming bitrates by as much as 40 or even 50% (depending on who you talk to). Rumors that Apple would adopt the HEVC compression system have persisted for months, but the WWDC announcement is the first time Apple has officially confirmed that it’s definitely happening.
Apple has confirmed that HEVC will be adopted for all iOS 11, tvOS 11 and macOS High Sierra devices, but for me it’s the tvOS 11 implementation that’s the most intriguing. Why? Because it surely points towards Apple introducing a 4K-capable version of Apple TV in the near future - most likely during the brand’s traditional autumn hardware unveiling.
The biggest single challenge with streaming 4K-resolution video is the amount of extra data required to ship four times as many pixels in each and every frame. In fact, Apple cited this distribution infrastructure issue as one of the main reasons why it hadn’t included 4K support in the current 4th generation of its Apple TV box.
Applying HEVC to 4K sources, though, reduces the size of 4K data flows dramatically - and given that Apple has been delivering HD video perfectly happily without feeling the need to pay an HEVC license fee for years, it seems all but certain that its new HEVC agreement has been done with an eye on finally joining the likes of Netflix and Amazon in the 4K streaming space.
Unfortunately, though, the current Apple TV box can’t output 4K video streams to a 4K TV; it’s HDMI socket just isn’t up to the job. So if Apple wants its new 4K (and also, potentially, high dynamic range) video streams to be accessible to the customers who will actually benefit from them the most, it will need to release a new, fifth generation of Apple TV hardware.
Photo: Apple
Not supporting Netflix and Amazon in 4K is one of the current Apple TV's biggest weaknesses.
As ever with Apple, we likely won’t hear any formal confirmation about potential new Apple TV hardware until it’s ready to launch. This HEVC development, however, together with the way practically every Apple TV rival supports 4K and Tim Cook’s WWDC keynote suggestion that there will be more to say about Apple TV later this year, seems to me to make an imminent 4K Apple TV box all but inevitable.
Source: Forbes
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