And according to one of its customer representatives, the Swedish music streaming company is not keen on going beyond its AirPlay support for Apple TV and coming out with its own Apple TV app soon.
This certainly isn’t because of anything Apple is doing to prevent Spotify from making an app—Pandora is on Apple TV, so it’s possible. I wonder if Spotify is just being childish here.
It’s simple: They want to entertain the option of allowing people to subscribe via the AppleTV interface, but refuse to pay Apple’s 30% tax. I don’t blame them, if I was Amazon or Spotify I would avoid that tax as well.
They could put a free Spotify player app on there without offering subscription signups in the app, and not pay Apple another dime.
Spotify also offers listeners the option to purchase music. Creating a player only app would force them to forgo this form of revenue.
While I have purchased every Apple TV since the 1st generation aluminum unit, I have recently switched to Roku (a 2 and 3) due to the fact that watching Amazon Prime was impossible without AirPlaying from another device. Also, the new remote is cumbersome to use and I find I consistently miss my target. Not an issue on the previous Apple TV models or my Roku boxes. Now, only my kids use the Apple TV 4 for games. They even switch to Roku for Netflix.
AppleTV AirPlay support for streaming audio isn’t very good : you can’t use the same UI as Apple do with its Music app. Perhaps it’s one of the reason that prevent Spotify to make a great app on the AppleTV. Small but significant detail.
Want the distribution? Share the revenue. Don’t want to share the revenue? Ok, no distribution for you.
Childish with respect to Apple TV? You mean like Amazon?
not producing a playback-only app (aka, a companion app to your subscription) just to avoid paying overhead for a new subscribers is anti-user. spotify users are already customers, their needs should be met over the potential loss of 30% from potential new users.
to not do so is to live by the opposite of the motto “delight the customer”.
amazon doing the same crap is also pitiful, and tells me they dont respect me as an existing customer.
amazon sucks too, no news there… part of the reason they make it so difficult to contact them — my parents can never find the nested links.
To me there are two possibilities that Spotify is doing this. One is they are unwilling to do to the work. The second reason they have contracts they forbid then to making an AppleTV app.