Apple wants viewers to discover shows on Apple TV just like they find new music on Apple Music.
The tech company is reportedly working on a new app that will recommend TV shows to viewers through Apple’s streaming platform, according to USA Today. The app will create customized watch lists for viewers based on the content they stream through Apple TV. Using the app, internally called “Watch List,” someone who watched AMC’s The Walking Dead on Apple TV, and also has FX’s streaming app, might be served a recommendation for The Strain, as an example.
Apple is expected to announce the app this week. It’s unclear when, but the company is hosting an event tomorrow (Oct. 27) at its Cupertino, California headquarters.
Apple did not immediately respond to Quartz’s request for comment.
Streaming apps like Spotify and Apple Music have leaned on personalized playlists to differentiate themselves from a crowded sea of music services. Spotify’s Discover Weekly section, a fan favorite, has 4,500 curated playlists, while Apple has a mammoth catalog of 14,000 playlists, all created within the past year. Both music services, along with others like Pandora and iHeartRadio, tout the power of their playlist-generating algorithms, or their human curators.
There’s still a lot of room to experiment with playlists in the TV realm though. Streaming video apps like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video offer customized recommendations for movies and shows within their apps, based on users’ viewing habits. But there’s no single app that really lets viewers discover programs across streaming services.
Apple already opened the door for this kind of technology. Its current, fourth-generation Apple TV lets users search for movies and TV shows in multiple apps at once using Siri. And at its Worldwide Developer Conference in June, Apple announced that cable subscribers would be able to log in into all their network apps, like NBC and FXNow at once, instead of having to sign into each one separately.