Apple CEO Tim Cook announced impressive figures for its Apple TV set-top-box that has reached 20 million units so far and made more than $1 billion in content sales.
Apple, the renowned electronics manufacturer of smartphones, computers, and entertainment equipments, announced the financial results for the first calendar quarter and second fiscal quarter of 2014. The company's Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook said his company sold more than 20 million units of Apple TV media-streaming box. The impressive number doesn't stop at that as Cook also noted that content purchase directly from Apple TV generated more than $1 billion. Ample reason for Cook to drop the "hobby" label from its set-top box!
Apple started off the media-streaming box as a hobby for the company but after witnessing an impressive response from millions of customers, Cook decided to strip off the hobby label from Apple TV. The set-top box became a popular choice in the media-streaming business and managed to push 20 million units off the shelves since 2007, when the original Apple TV was launched. If that number doesn't seem as great as its iPhone sales, compare it with Roku's video-streaming units that have sold 8 million units as of earlier this year, CNET reports.
In a transcript of Apple's earnings call published by MacRumors which details the Q&A session with Cook , it clearly shows his excitement about Apple TV and its future growth. Cook stayed mum on Amazon's deal with HBO to bring older programming to its Prime and Fire TV, but said the content available on Apple TV is "extremely favorable" when compared with Amazon's box.
"We have HBO Go already on Apple TV and you have to authenticate in order to use it, but you have to do that with Amazon's service as well from my brief read of their announcement," Cook said towards the end of the company's earnings call, Wednesday. "From that, they got some older content from HBO to put on there and I haven't had a chance to evaluate exactly what it is and don't have a personal POV of that. Look broadly, compares extremely favorable to the content that is on the Amazon box."
Some of the excerpts from Apple's quarterly earning call include the impressive statistics of its iTunes, which Cook boasted had 800 million accounts, mostly with credit cards.
