Tidal continues push on Apple platforms with native Apple TV app
Tidal on Wednesday introduced a native app for the fourth-generation Apple TV and the Apple TV 4K, making it easier to use the on-demand music service in the living room.
As with many titles, Tidal uses a more graphically rich interface on the Apple TV, with a streamlined design better suited to the Siri Remote and tvOS guidelines. On top of listening to songs, albums and playlists, subscribers can also watch videos, such as concerts and the Beyonce visual album "Lemonade."
Tidal is also promising subscribers to its $19.99 HiFi tier the same lossless audio they get on other platforms.
Earlier this month the service came to vehicles equipped with Apple CarPlay. Today's rollout could signal that Tidal is making a harder push on Apple devices, though the company has yet to release an Apple Watch app.
Tidal is owned by rapper Jay-Z, and co-owned by other famous artists, often serving up exclusives. Despite this, it has largely sat in the shadows of rivals Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora. It could potentially have as little as six months' worth of cash, though it publicly denies this and even says it should turn a profit by mid-2018 -- something Spotify has struggled with, despite being the world's most popular on-demand service.
As with many titles, Tidal uses a more graphically rich interface on the Apple TV, with a streamlined design better suited to the Siri Remote and tvOS guidelines. On top of listening to songs, albums and playlists, subscribers can also watch videos, such as concerts and the Beyonce visual album "Lemonade."
Tidal is also promising subscribers to its $19.99 HiFi tier the same lossless audio they get on other platforms.
Earlier this month the service came to vehicles equipped with Apple CarPlay. Today's rollout could signal that Tidal is making a harder push on Apple devices, though the company has yet to release an Apple Watch app.
Tidal is owned by rapper Jay-Z, and co-owned by other famous artists, often serving up exclusives. Despite this, it has largely sat in the shadows of rivals Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora. It could potentially have as little as six months' worth of cash, though it publicly denies this and even says it should turn a profit by mid-2018 -- something Spotify has struggled with, despite being the world's most popular on-demand service.
Comments
So Tidal comes out a while back and the company can't stand on its own so it starts attacking Apple publicly, hoping to garner the anti-Apple crowd.
And when Apple stops them from pirating a Drake song over their services, they claim "Apple is interfering with artistry" rather than apologizing for their theft. Apple didn't interfere with artistry - the artist performed and people could enjoy it - but not on Tidal.
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Kind of ironic since Tidal tried to score a coup over iTunes by signing artists who would try to prevent Apple customers from accessing their new music.
But then hen of course, Tidal sucked. And so you had Jay Z limping back to Apple to actually make any real money off his album, followed by Kanye west.
Then West was basically begging for Apple to buy Tidal. Sad and pathetic, no?
no surprise then that Tidal is running back to Apple in more ways to try to keep that ship from sinking further.
Its been out for long long enough now and has yet to turn a profit? Bad sign. In business class, they teach you to cut your losses in times like this.
No one wants Tidal. Its just another unnecessary expense at this point. Too many others do it better, including Apple.
Perhaps if if they had conducted themselves more honestly and without the gimmick of manipulating fans through manufactured hate, I'd feel for them. But bad ethics deserve this kind of reward. Hope it's a lesson learned for everyone who was involved in pointing the company in the direction it went.
I've done their audio-phile test on their website and I think I got 4 out of 5 at the time but I get much better quality using Spotify's equalizer feature to be honest depending which device I'm listening on.
I've just checked on their website now and it's no longer there. Basically you'd play 2 samples of each track and you had to guess which one was the higher quality one. I think there were 5 songs in the test. I'd say that was around 2014 or 2015? Not sure what they'd do if you failed in all 5 though as that would mean you really don't need Tidal!
Tidal's most reliable and lucrative customers are the audiophile crowd since it has lossless CD quality streaming of their catalog and they are doing high resolution audio through MQA. There is a pretty robust third party support community of this feature with high end receivers, pre-pros, music players and DACs.
That being said, the big question is, "is it enough"? I have a friend who is one of Tidal's minority owners (and a very well known artist) and even he admitted that the roll out with the video of all the major star investors didn't get the response they had hoped.
As to the Tidal app on Apple TV, my complaint was that it's not obvious what quality of streaming that you are getting. I think the app is defaulting to the level you are paying for (Premium is lossy, HiFI is CD quality lossless) but there's nothing in the app to say so. And it doesn't look like MQA is supported at all but I think that can't really happen until Apple introduces the revamped CoreAudio library. As it stands, Apple TV is biased toward video which means audio is locked into a 48 kHz sampling rate (the standard for Dolby and DTS audio) and not 44.1 (CD quality) or other higher sampling rates (which MQA could take advantage of).