“As Apple prepares to introduce a TV service to compete with Amazon’s Prime, Netflix and others, the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that reveals that they may bring biometric authentication to the Apple TV remote to eliminate the hassle of entering passcodes and be able to recognize who is attempting to use the services on Apple TV,” Jack Purcher reports for Patently Apple.
“Parents may have full access whereas children and teens in the household may have restrictions placed on what content they can access and more importantly, purchase. This future remote with biometrics may also work with many home devices in the future and may be tightly tied into HomeKit so that the remote could access and control other household devices, such as a security system, appliances, lights and more while watching TV,” Purcher reports. “The biometrics could be fingerprint based or use other methodologies including iris and facial recognition.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: This would also nicely allow for Apple Pay purchases via Apple TV which would be a boon for retailers, banks, content providers, app developers for in-app purchases, and more!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “TJ” for the heads up.]
And who will care since the loyal user base just upgraded our multiple ATV3’s to multiple ATV4’s taking a significant price increase on each unit? And even then the units SUCKED. Most of the people I know who own an Apple TV also own at least a Fire Stick, a Chromecast or a Roku – because Apple didn’t deliver. And don’t fool yourself into thinking we don’t feel exactly that. For that price increase, we should have gotten a lot more – 4K video since the iPhone supported it at that time, a remote that made sense on top of introducing Siri, and a nice Apple TV channel package would have really sealed the deal. Now we have our other devices that are usually primary and we have our other channel packages – Hulu, Netflix, DirecTVNow, etc. So, if Apple expects me to come out of pocket with significant money, they really should blow me away and I’m not even sure that’s possible. My personal thought is that for the privilege of doing their QA work on the Apple TV, I should get a free ATV5 because my time with the ATV4 has been expensive and painful. As with the car, Apple might be better off stepping away from the TV. I think there’s a lot of room in the segment for them but they seem to be doing really stupid things and at least appearing to not have their act together. So now they are operating from a negative stance in my view.
Stepping away would be a big mistake whatever their previous incompetence. TV and computers and mobile will all become much closer in terms of integration and to ignore that would be tantamount to Microsoft ignoring the mobile space for so long (or at least doing it appalingly) which will now affect it for the foreseeable future and probably well beyond. Can only hope that Apple can get back in better than any of Microsofts at present but this is still all relatively new so it has the opportunity if it gets its act together. After all it doesn’t need to own the market but like its other products it simply needs to own the sections from which the money emanates and thats still there to be won.