According to the latest data from eMarketer, Apple’s most-recent efforts to cement its home entertainment solution have proven no more successful than its earlier endeavours.
eMarketer says that Apple TV “is at the bottom of the U.S. connected TV market, behind Google Chromecast and Roku, with its share shrinking.”
The firm reports that in the US Apple TV is used by just 11.9% of connected TV customers, continuing its decline from 12.5% in September 2016 and 13.5% in 2014.
These numbers make for a stark comparison to those of Google’s Chromecast, which rose to 19.9% over the holiday quarter, up from 16.2% in 2015.
First brought to market a decade ago, Apple relaunched the Apple TV in 2015 as a competitor to streaming boxes from companies like Google.
Despite that relaunch, it’s failed to garner much traction with Apple even taking the recent step of increasing the maximum size of tvOS apps from 200MB to 4GB to encourage developers to grow the platform’s software library.
Apple has not made comment on the report. However, given the recent rumours that the company may be looking to move into the content-creation game, it’s likely they’re banking on popular scripted content to reverse the trend.
Locally, Apple TV is priced at $239 (32GB) and $299 (64GB). While it received a relatively warm reception from critics over its Universal Search feature, its price has likely made it hard-sell to all but the most fervent Apple fans.
