Apple has been granted a patent (number 20210021903) for a “TV side bar user interface” that reveals work on future live TV viewing features in its Apple TV app. Apple’s patent application illustration displays the schedule for broadcast, cable, and/or satellite TV.
Dennis Sellers for Apple World Today:
Here’s the summary of the patent: “A media content provider includes storage for storing and serving video content to subscribers. The media content provider records and or otherwise stores video content from around the world. Subscribers are provided a user interface to the system that includes a side bar. The side bar includes multiple elements representing different categories of video content. By selecting a given category, available content is filtered according to the selected category and presented.
“Content which is presented may include live broadcast video for multiple channels on multiple television networks or other content providers. The side bar may further include a collection category specific to a given viewer. Selection of such a category may display video content within the collection. Subcategories in the side bar may be selected for further filtering of available content.
MacDailyNews Take: After the unfortunate demise of Sony PlayStation Vue, we ended up switching to YouTube TV, which is not as good as PlayStation Vue, and which we’re loathe to use as it’s from privacy-trampling Google, but it has contracts to display certain networks that we like to have for live TV (NFL Redzone, for one example). We’d love to be able to drop it in favor of adding a live TV option to our Apple One subscription with a better interface than YouTube TV offers.
As a cord cutter, I no longer have cable or satellite. We switched to Amazon Recast (for Live OTA DVR cababilities) and Amazon 4k Firesticks. I’m fed up with the lack of quality in that ecosystem. The Recast has the crappiest “channel/content guide”. It takes a serious research effort to locate days/times of the shows I want to record. As for the fire sticks…the remote quality sucks! I’ve had to replace 2 different sticks b/c the remote just stops working. I’ve come to discover on YouTube that the contacts inside the remote are not soldered to the contacts on the circuit board. Eventually the spring contacts weaken. Fixes include breaking the remote apart and stretching out the spring contacts (stupidity). I’m seriously ready to switch to a better Apple solution.
I have a sub to CBS All Access and can get NBC on my antenna. I get ESPN+ with my Hulu/Disney+ sub, I’m annoyed that I can’t watch Fox or ESPN NFL games and that the NFL hasn’t sold an all games streaming package to someone.
I use a cheap Sling subscription to then stream from the individual channel apps which are very high quality.
This would be a fantastic idea and I think it would really be a game changer, being a cord cutter myself it is one thing I do miss about sky q