This blog post is written with contributions from Pritesh Modi, Accedo's Sales & Solutions Engineering Manager.

Apple TV has steadily grown in the Smart TV market, thanks to its premium branding and deep integration with Apple’s ecosystem, offering users a seamless, high-quality viewing experience across devices. The unified development platform for iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS makes it a compelling choice for content providers, enhancing the range of available content. In North America, Apple TV has seen significant growth, increasing its share of viewing by 58% year-over-year, reaching 8% of the market by Q1 2024. By the end of 2024, Apple TV is expected to attract around 44.1 million viewers, marking a 4.75% increase from the previous year, further positioning it as a promising platform for video streaming services.

This blog post continues our OEM Overview Series, where we explore different OEMs to help you determine the best options for expanding your OTT service. We’ve covered Roku, Comcast X1, Vizio SmartCast, LG webOS, Samsung Tizen OS, and Amazon Fire TV. Now, we turn our attention to Apple TV, breaking down its strengths and unique features as a platform for OTT growth.

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Apple’s integrated ecosystem enhances the quality of your OTT service.

Apple TV stands out with lower device fragmentation compared to its competitors, ensuring consistent functionality across all devices newer than the Apple TV HD (4th Gen, released in 2012). This uniformity means your app will deliver a reliable experience for users across Apple TV models, reducing compatibility issues and enhancing viewer satisfaction.

Apple’s integrated ecosystem combines proprietary features with industry standards to elevate content discoverability, control, and viewing quality. Key features include:

• Apple TV app (not to be confused with Apple TV+): The app serves as a unified content hub across all Apple devices, making it easy for users to discover and engage with your video service. Integrating with Apple’s video catalog feed and playback reporting ensures seamless access and better content visibility, enhancing discoverability and retention.
• Secure cross-device data collection: Apple’s ecosystem enables seamless connectivity between devices, such as using an iPhone to control an Apple TV app. This opens unique engagement opportunities like polls, advanced menus, and even health data integration (available on Apple TV 4K), creating a more interactive user experience.
• SharePlay Social watching: SharePlay allows users to watch content together over FaceTime with synchronized playback and shared controls, enhancing the social aspect of media consumption. This feature not only adds value to your app but also increases user stickiness by enabling shared experiences.
• Top Shelf: This content discoverability feature allows your service to promote content on Apple TV's home screen, engaging users before they even open your app. It showcases dynamic full-screen images, videos, or relevant content like favorites and recently viewed items. Implementing Top Shelf requires a TVServices app extension, and content can be displayed in various styles, including carousels and full-screen media.

Additionally, the Apple Video Partner Program offers premium video services broader exposure across tvOS features like Universal Search, Siri, and the Apple TV app. The program also provides a more favorable commission structure for subscriptions made through Apple’s in-app purchase system, further boosting monetization potential.

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Seamless monetization and in-app purchases

Apple TV stands out in the connected TV space with its tightly integrated monetization approach, leveraging Apple's ecosystem to deliver a frictionless in-app purchasing experience for SVOD services. With Apple ID billing, subscribers can easily manage accounts across devices, minimizing churn compared to platforms that rely on third-party payment systems. This streamlined process enhances user retention and provides OTT providers with a more efficient path to revenue.

For ad-supported streaming, Apple TV has support from major advertising solutions such as Google Ads Manager to launch AVOD and FAST capabilities, offering flexible ad insertion with IMA SDKs for tvOS. Apple TV’s seamless cross-device experience enables users to start a transaction on one device and continue on another. Coupled with support for high-quality formats like 4K HDR and a privacy-centric approach, Apple TV effectively caters to premium audiences while commanding higher subscription prices and setting a benchmark for user-focused monetization.

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Device performance that is second to none

Apple TV is also typically the most powerful device as it consistently outperforms its competitors, delivering faster stream start times and lower buffering rates. Its high performance enables a smoother, more engaging user experience with features like parallax effects and seamless animations. It also supports advanced media capabilities such as 4K, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, and Spatial Audio. Additionally, Apple TV can display multiple video streams simultaneously within an app, allowing for more dynamic user experiences.

As a Pay TV operator you may be interested in using Apple TV devices as a set-top box for your customers. This will require additional integrations to support single sign-on and zero sign-on, and can serve as a kick-start to onboarding with the Apple Video Partner Program.

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Considerations when deploying on Apple TV

Building for Apple TV means tapping into a sophisticated ecosystem with powerful development tools, enabling efficient workflows and code sharing across Apple platforms. The consistent user experience offered by Apple’s UI frameworks enhances content discoverability, engagement, and monetization potential for your OTT service. With Apple’s premium user base, your app can benefit from higher engagement and retention, making the investment in Apple TV development a valuable step for reaching high-quality, tech-savvy audiences.

When building applications for Apple tvOS, consider the following important factors:

The basic: XCode and UI Kit 

Apple TV development uses familiar Apple tools like Xcode, Swift, and UIKit, making it easy for developers experienced with iOS to build tvOS apps. The ability to reuse code across Apple platforms speeds up development and reduces costs for teams with existing mobile apps.

Saving time with SwiftUI

SwiftUI, Apple’s declarative UI framework, further simplifies development by handling layouts and animations automatically, making it ideal for building apps that work on both iOS and tvOS. However, it’s important to consider that mixing SwiftUI and UIKit can add complexity.

Video foundations

For video apps, AVFoundation, with tools like AVKit and AVPlayer, provides advanced features for media playback, including picture-in-picture, AirPlay, and secure content delivery with Fairplay DRM, ensuring a high-quality user experience.

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How can Accedo support your goals on Apple TV?

Accedo is a certified vendor of Apple’s Partner Integrator Program and has been developing  and deploying iOS/tvOS for nearly two decades. We are a trusted, technical expert that can aid companies in taking advantage of Apple's industry-leading features, including video on demand integration with the Apple TV app, live sports integration with the Apple TV app, universal search, Siri support, authentication, single sign-on, zero sign-on, and AirPlay support to ensure a premier customer experience. 

With this partnership, Accedo has launched a number of market-responsive, end-to-end solutions for customers, globally, to realize their goals such as Starz, CNN Go, Hallmark Channel, Deutsche Telekom, NBCUniversal, Common Sense Media, and more. 

As your video ecosystem partner, we reduce the complexity of launching and growing your video service. We provide various frameworks and solutions designed and developed from our long-standing learnings and expertise. If you’re looking for a streamlined process to build once and deploy across multiple devices, our modular architecture ensures easy integration and scalability. For businesses aiming for a fast-track, high-quality OTT app launch, we offer a solution built on a cloud-based system, allowing you to dynamically update the user experience in real time. If optimizing user engagement is your goal, we provide tools that leverage audience insights and analytics, enabling continuous UX/UI experimentation to drive performance.

Whether you’re interested in building an iOS/tvOS app or you’re looking for operational efficiency to reduce costs, contact us to learn more about our end-to-end streaming app development and managed services offerings.