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Apple gives sports fans a live TV option with the addition of FuboTV

Simon Cohen
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Apple’s TV app, which lets you search for and watch content from more than 100 compatible video services in a single interface, has only offered one live TV streaming option — Sony’s PlayStation Vue — until now. That service is joined by competitor FuboTV, giving Apple users a second choice for over-the-top (OTT) livestreaming from major broadcasters.

“FuboTV is a leading provider of live sports programming, entertainment, and news,” Min Kim, vice president of business development, FuboTV said in a press release. “We’re hyper-focused on delivering the best, most innovative viewing experiences possible as our recent 4K HDR Beta streams demonstrate. That’s why we’re excited about the FuboTV integration with the Apple TV app.”

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FuboTV made a name for itself in the livestreaming space thanks to a heavy focus on sports content — it offers more sports channels in its base package than any other service — and a platform built on in-house technology, which has proven more robust at critical moments than Hulu and PlayStation Vue. Its addition to the Apple TV app gives subscribers the ability to choose any of the service’s game broadcasts to the watch next list, as well as being able to choose specific teams as favorites.

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For now, TV app users will need to sign-in to FuboTV on each iOS and tvOS device, but a forthcoming single sign-in update will allow a single authentication to carry from device to device. Another benefit of integrating with the Apple TV app is being able to use Siri for voice commands. Issuing directives like, “watch FX live,” or “watch CNN live,” will immediately bring up the content in question.

The addition of FuboTV to the Apple TV app comes at a time when the video curation space is really heating up. Recently, it was announced that Reelgood, an intelligent streaming search and recommendation service, will start appearing on millions of smart TVs in the U.S. Meanwhile, Roku is continuing to add features to its platform via the Roku Channel, which lets viewers find free, ad-supported content, as well as subscribe to premium streaming services. Roku’s universal search is one of the best we’ve seen. Plex, a media server with support across dozens of platforms, already brings together music, photos, and videos in one interface, along with live over-the-air TV support, and it may well be getting ready to add support for live TV streaming too.

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Simon Cohen
Simon Cohen
Contributing Editor, A/V
Simon Cohen covers a variety of consumer technologies, but has a special interest in audio and video products, like spatial…
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