An old article, but I have some thoughts:

“At launch we’ll have iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, Showtime, and HBO — so we’ll have five major inputs into universal search initially,” Cook said. “But we’re also opening an API, so that others can join in.”

I still have some questions:

  • How open will this API be? Any app can join? How do you prevent YouTube from populating your search results? What about Plex, or other apps that can play content not guaranteed to have been obtained legally?
  • From the demo we got, it seems that if you search for a movie or TV Show, you get a single screen with its metadata and sources to play from. How will Apple make movies and TV Shows unique on this search? Will they provide some sort of tool to look up the unique identifier of a given movie or show?