No music angle here, but an interesting insight into Apple’s growing ‘hobby’ around TV and video content. The company has quietly acquired a startup called Matcha, which launched an iPad app last year aggregating TV shows and films from Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, iTunes and US cable provider Xfinity TV, serving them up as a personalised discovery app showing content from whatever services a user had available. It also offered reviews, film information and trailers. Now it seemingly belongs to Apple, with VentureBeat reporting that Apple paid between $1m and $1.5m for the San Francisco-based startup, and Apple giving its standard response to acquisition enquiries: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.” Cue speculation: this could be about turning iPad into a better discovery device for the gamut of streaming video services, but it could also be related to Apple’s long-rumoured ambitions to do more in the TV market, either through ramping up its Apple TV set-top box business, or by making its own TV.
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Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…