Software for jailbroken Apple TVs rising, receiving ‘a lot of interest,’ FireCore says

Consumer interest insoftware for “jailbroken” Apple TV units has grown over the years as pricing for the product has fallen, James Abeler, director of business development at FireCore, said in an interview. FireCore, based in Denver, Colo., sells software called aTV Flash for jailbroken Apple Inc. Apple TV boxes. Jailbroken devices provide root access to the unit's operating system and allow for the installation of new platforms. The company offers a free software tool called Seas0nPass to jailbreak first- and second-generation Apple TV units and sells its aTV Flash software to install on those jailbroken Apple TV boxes for $30 to $40. The company is now working towards providing a new jailbreak and aTV Flash platform for Apple's third-generation device. “We've had a lot of interest in the platform, and a lot of people are excited about the upcoming aTV 3,” Abeler said in a phone interview. “We want to continue to improve upon the platform.” Apple's Apple TV box, which provides access to online movies and video and retails new for about $100, does not have a web browser and requires users to play video through the Apple TV store or to select from paid-content apps from Major League Baseball, Netflix Inc., and others. Most users of the system want more than what they can get through iTunes and do not want to convert their files to an iTunes-friendly format, Abeler said. “Out of the box, the Apple TV does a lot of things really well, but one of the things it really lacks is the ability to play a wide array of formats and stream from a number of different sources,” he said, noting that some users have “thousands and thousands” of video files they want to watch through their Apple TV system. “We've found that people don't want to go through that hassle, so that's why we've made what we've made,” he said. FireCore launched in 2007, released its first-generation aTV Flash program in the spring of 2008, Abeler said. The company has since grown to a staff of 12, and since 2009, its revenue has risen annually by between 61 to 90 per cent, Abeler said. Abeler declined to disclose specific sales numbers but said interest in the aTV Flash application has risen as Apple has reduced pricing of the unit from about $300 a few years ago to $100 today. “You can find plenty of people who are doing it. There's a good chunk of folks who are wanting a little bit more from the Apple TV,” Abeler said. “We had a pretty good user following with the first-generation model, and we carried that over to the second-generation Apple TV.” He added: “There hasn't really been anyone else coming out and making apps for the Apple TV, like we have, at this point.” Apple has sold more than 6.8 million Apple TV units, according to company CEO Tim Cook. During a Jan. 24, 2012 earnings call, Cook said the company sold more than 2.8 million Apple TVs in the 2011 fiscal year. In a third-quarter 2012 earnings call on July 24, Cook said the company sold four million units during the first nine months of the 2012 fiscal year, “which is pretty incredible.” The second-generation Apple TV no longer sells new in stores, Abeler said, but because there is a jailbreak program for the second-gen device, it currently sells for more than the newer, third-gen box. Higher resolution, third-generation Apple TV boxes sell for $97 US on Amazon.com whereas new, second-generation units sell for $210 US new or $150 US used, according to a search of Amazon.com on Aug. 30. Users, once they install aTV Flash, can load apps such as a music app, a browser, weather forecasts, as well as third-party plugins, Abeler said. He said the biggest consumer draw to using aTV Flash is its media player, which can access and play various media files on a user's computer as well as a browser to watch streaming video. They can do this with the Apple TV feature called Airplay, which uses a local WiFi signal to play files from a user's Mac computer, iPad or iPhone. “We're not really involved in a jailbreak development process or anything like that. We just provide a need-to-follow path to get that done so you can install aTV Flash. Our main focus is developing aTV Flash and the apps,” he said. Mike Fujimoto, an Apple TV user in Ottawa who jailbroke his device, said in a phone interview that one of the drawbacks of Apple TV as it comes out of the box is the inability to freely browse the web. The YouTube app that comes with the device does not provide complete access to the social video site, he said. Fujimoto said he jailbroke his Apple TV device and uses an open-source media platform called XBMC to help run applications that were not intended to be used with the device. “It's like night and day, the difference,” he said. “It's allowing you to play the media that you want to in the format you have it in.” He said Apple is trying to drive users to iTunes and paid content “and they've locked it in to be like that. When you jailbreak it, it opens it up to all sorts of other options.” Websites like Project Free TV provide add-ons for the XBMC platform to access streaming content, Fujimoto said. “There's a huge community of people who are working on this,” he said. Abeler said the absence of an app store right now makes the Apple TV platform unattractive to developers, and he expects that to change at some point. “I think Apple has an app store in mind for Apple TV at some point in the future. If we can keep the excitement up until that time, and have some kind of official channel, we'll have a head start over everyone else, hopefully,” he said. sdoyle@thewirereport.ca

Software for jailbroken Apple TVs rising, receiving ‘a lot of interest,’ FireCore says

Broadcast | September 6, 2012

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