Rumor: Apple shifting TV efforts towards creating overarching guide, looks to make others’ content easily accessible

Apple seems to have shifted gears from wanting to make an ultimate TV for you to telling you what’s on TV and helping you watch it.

The company has apparently started talking to TV programmers and other video companies about creating a digital TV guide that would work on both Apple TV boxes and other Apple devices, like iPhones.

The new goal seems to be to let users know what’s available in video apps by providers like HBO, Netflix and ESPN, then play the shows and movies without having to transition between apps.

Sources have stated that the revised plan is an outgrowth of the TV service Apple wanted to launch in 2015. The television industry, which had changed radically, was now essentially app-based and with the revised idea, Apple can take the content that’s out there, let users easily find it and allow customers and distributors work out the money and licensing rights on their own ends.

Apple laid out the first part of this plan in public in June at its WWDC event, when it announced a “single sign-on” plan that’s supposed to let pay TV customers access video programmers’ apps without having to continually provide logins and passwords. If pay TV distributors sign on to the plan, it would let users access and download multiple “TV Everywhere” apps more easily.

Since June, Apple has been in discussions with programmers about providing metadata as to what’s in their apps that would help Apple build a guide.

Apple already has extensive data about many video programmers’ apps, which it uses for its Siri-powered search function. So it’s not clear whether Apple needs more information to make the guide work, or just wants programmers’ blessing to include them in the guide.

Such a guide would only make Apple’s own hardware, such as the Apple TV set top box, that much more valuable in the consumer marketplace.

It’s a pretty big change from Apple’s original plan, but it definitely makes sense.

Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.

Via Recode