Today is a day for big tech companies to just … give up, apparently! We’ll start with Apple, which, after years of trying to develop its own live TV service, is apparently throwing in the towel – for now. Apple has struggled for years to convince networks to sign deals letting Apple carry their live TV programming as part of a special package offered to Apple TV owners. Now, Apple says it will be focusing on apps instead.
By that, we mean that Apple is going to do more or less what everyone else has been doing in the streaming TV space and focus on making it easy for networks to get their content on Apple TV the way they want to. In many ways, like Roku.
Next on today’s tech fail list is Mozilla, which, after four years of work on FireFox OS, is also giving up. FireFox OS is a browser-based smart phone operating system that was eventually scaled for use in other devices such as Panasonic’s smart TVs.
We thought it worked well as a TV operating system, but FireFox says it is giving up on SmartPhones because … well, things just aren’t working out. Analysts suggest the same thing could happen to Tizen, Samsung’s own OS spinoff used in its smart watches and smart tv’s, and probably to Blackberry OS as well, which has seemingly been on life support for years now.
You know who isn’t giving up today, though? Microsoft, believe it or not.
Today, Microsoft announced that its personal digital assistant, Cortana, is now available as a downloadable app on iOS and Android devices. Cortana works a lot like Apple’s Siri and Google’s Google Now service, The main difference being that Cortana can set the same appointments and reminders, track stocks, game scores, all lots more across both your PC and your phone, connecting the two devices in ways they’ve not been synced before.
This could get interesting! Siri and Cortana duking it out for your attention? We’re pretty sure there’s a Celebrity Deathmatch concept in there somewhere.
As always, you can learn more about these stories and all the days big tech-news at Digital Trends.com. That’s it for DT Daily today, we’ll see ya again tomorrow.
