Eddy Cue Says Apple TV, With 20 Million Units Sold, Will Continue To Evolve

Apple TV has been a pretty modest success when you compare it to some of Apple’s other products, but with 20 million units sold, the product has clearly captured consumer attention. Tonight at the CODE Conference, Apple SVP Eddy Cue said the Apple TV will continue to evolve as the company seeks to improve upon today’s TV experience.

Sales on Apple TV topped $1 billion last year, and Cue said it will be even bigger in fiscal 2014. The company will continue to update the product as a way to improve the user experience for consumers.

Cue noted that the company had added a lot of new content to the Apple TV, and has tied more of its content to iCloud, like user photos.

When trying to explain the reason for the interest in TV, Cue said that it’s because the TV user experience is so bad. In particular, it hasn’t changed in the last several decades.

Cue said the biggest innovation he’s seen came with the introduction of the VCR, which allowed users to record content. But since then, the experience has been “stuck.”

Still, there’s work to be done. Even with the growth of TV Everywhere services, the large number of different content providers and services means that it’s never really clear which content consumers have access to. According to Cue, there are also rights issues that need to be worked out.

That’s something Apple is no doubt looking to solve, as it thinks about the next vertical that it can disrupt with innovative new products.