Apple's new Apple TV making its way to Retail Stores today

The new, more powerful and Siri and touch-enabled Apple TV is now available in a number of Apple Retail Stores in Canada. The much anticipated set-top box may not offer Canadian users as wide a range of content as its US counterpart but still brings the promise of smoother and more intelligent search, apps and games.

The Apple TV has evolved with Apple's focus from iTunes content in the first generations to apps and services which includes Apple Music and iCloud. Using Siri to find shows and even get contextual information, rewind, go forward or look for works by specific actor or director are just some of the cool features the new Apple TV can deliver. We'll be testing one in the next couple of days and should document our impressions right here.

Apple Music on Apple TV to get Siri integration

Perhaps in a bid to get more users to subscribe to Apple Music, the company will be adding Siri support for Apple Music on the new Apple TV. So, you can ask it to play you your favorite albums and the like. Siri’s already able to conduct universal searches for video content on the set-top box, now it will be able to do it for music, too. Well, at least it will be able to do so by early next year.

Source: BuzzFeed | Via: 9to5Mac

Amazon to stop selling Apple and Google streaming devices

This could raise flags with regulators as Amazon decides to stop selling Apple TV and Google Chromecast on its site by October 29^th. Their reason? From the looks of it, to get more people to use their Prime Video service. According to Amazon, “Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime. It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion.”

But are they breaching any anti-trust laws? By stopping sale of items by their competitors, are they stifling competition? Do they have that big of a market to make this move illegal? Let’s see if this raises any flags. For now, you still have until the end of the month to shop for these items on Amazon.

Source: Slate

VideoLAN developing VLC app for Apple TV

VideoLAN, the team behind VLC app, is making its presence felt on Apple’s ecosystem. According to VideoLAN’s lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the VLC app for Apple TV is still in its early stages but they are making progress with it. “Finally, some code to build VLCKit for the new tvOS was merged. It’s very early though, but we have video playback!”

VLC is an app that lets users play video and audio files in a variety of formats. But they aren’t alone in supporting Apple TV. The company behind Plex, an app that lets you stream files from your computer, also has plans for Apple’s set-top box. We should be hearing more about these in the near future.

Source: JBKempf.com | Via: The Verge