Apple's spending a ton of money to produce its own TV content.
Apple is planting its own flag in the streaming wars with Apple TV+, its in-house streaming service that features only original programming—no reruns of hit TV shows or last year’s blockbuster movies.
The company is said to be spending several billion dollars a year on original programming. That’s a lot of TV! Apple is attracting some of the best talent in TV and film production, including huge stars and directors, and locking down the television and movie rights to best-selling books.
Though the service is relatively new and has few shows available, there’s a lot in the works. This is a list of all its content for it that we know of so far, along with details about prominent stars, directors, producers, and release dates.
NextVR, which is located in Orange County, California, has a decade of experience marrying virtual reality with sports and entertainment. The company currently provides VR experiences for viewing live events with headsets from PlayStation, Oculus, HTC, Microsoft, Lenovo headsets.
The icing on the cake may not be expertise in virtual reality, however, as NextVR also has holds patented technology that upscales video streams. NextVR uses this technology to support high quality video streams of music and sporting events to VR headsets. NextVR holds over 40 technology patents in total.
The company failed to secure a Series C round of funding in early 2019, however, which resulted in a 40% staff reduction at the time. NextVR’s focus on virtual reality was seen as a risk with the rise of augmented reality technology.
Apple is practically building the platform for its future headset out in the open with ARKit. What’s new is that Apple is believed to be in the process of acquiring a California-based virtual reality company called NextVR, 9to5Mac has learned.
NextVR has partnerships in place with the NBA, Fox Sports, Wimbledon, and other live music and sporting event partners.
The acquisition is expected to be valued around $100 million, and a shell company formed this year that’s believed to be Apple is hiring most of the engineers who develop the product. While the acquisition hasn’t closed yet, the two companies have began informing employees who will need to relocate from the San Diego area to presumably the Cupertino area.
We’ve reached out to Apple and NextVR for comment on the acquisition. We’ll update our coverage if we hear back from either company.
Apple developing new augmented reality app for iOS 14, testing Apple Store and Starbucks partnership
The iPhone or iPad would know about what augmented reality experience to begin based on QR-code like tags in the area. It is possible that iBeacons or Apple’s AirTags could also act as the trigger.
There will be some sort of SDK or API integration for third-party companies to provide their own tag identifiers, which would load up custom assets and scenery for that company. This would be based on extensions built into downloaded App Store apps. Apple appears to be currently trialing this feature with Starbucks.
Apple is developing a new app as part of its work on iOS 14. The new app, codenamed Gobi, will allow users to get more information about the world around them by using an augmented reality experience on the phone. The AR experience would also be part of Apple’s forthcoming AR headset project.
Based on 9to5Mac code findings, Apple appears to be testing integrations with Apple Stores and Starbucks. For instance, users would be able to hold up their phone in an Apple Store and view information about the products on display, get pricing, and compare features.
Apple Acquires AI Startup to Better Understand Natural Language
Apple Inc. acquired Voysis, an artificial intelligence startup that developed a platform for digital voice assistants to better understand people’s natural language.
Dublin, Ireland-based Voysis focused on improving digital assistants inside online shopping apps, so the software could respond more accurately to voice commands from users. A now-removed company webpage said the technology could narrow product search results by processing shopping phrases such as “I need a new LED TV” and “My budget is $1,000.” Voysis provided this AI to other companies to incorporate it into their own apps and voice assistants.
Read more about the startup here: Synthesizing Realistic Human Speech Just Got a Lot Easier
An Apple spokesman said the company “buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
Voysis’s system taps into Wavenets, an AI-based method for creating more human-like computer speech that was first developed by Google’s DeepMind in 2016. Voysis co-founder Peter Cahill said in 2018 that his company managed to shrink its system to the point where, once the AI is trained, the software uses as little as 25 megabytes of memory -- about the same size as four Apple Music songs. That made it much easier to run on smartphones without an internet connection.
Apple could use the acquired know-how improve Siri’s understanding of natural language or to offer the Voysis platform to thousands of developers that already integrate with the Apple digital assistant. Apple has been the top buyer of AI startups in recent years and has a portfolio that already includes former startups including Turi, Xnor.ai, and Laserlike.
Read more: Big Tech Swallows Most of the Hot AI Startups
Voysis was founded in 2012 and sold its services to several companies. It also had offices in Edinburgh and Boston and got $8 million in venture funding from Polaris Partners in 2017.
The acquisition is the second Apple deal disclosed this week. The Cupertino, California-based tech giant also bought Dark Sky, a popular weather app for iPhones and iPads.