At the end of Apple’s quarterly conference call Apple CEO Tim Cook threw out a somewhat surprising statistic.
Answering a question from Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster regarding Amazon’s recent acquirement of HBO content for Fire TV, Cook said Apple has now sold 20 million Apple TVs since the unit launched in 2007..
During Apple’s February shareholder meeting, Cook said he would stop calling the product a “hobby” and the ballooning sales numbers are likely part of that decision.
“The reason that I stripped off the ‘hobby label’ is that when you look at the sales of the Apple TV box itself and you look at content that was bought directly off the Apple TV, for 2013 that number was over a billion dollars,” Cook said. “So it didn’t feel right to me to call something that’s over a billion a ‘hobby.'”
As for the content wars currently underway between Apple, Amazon and Google, Cook said he doesn’t have a personal view as far as Amazon’s latest announcement of HBO Go availability. He did note that Apple TV has long had HBO shows since June 2013 while Amazon is just now receiving “older content.”
Amazon released its Fire TV set-top streamer earlier in April without HBO support, a glaring deficiency for many would-be buyers.
