Apple hires Amazon Fire TV boss to head Apple TV division

Apple has hired Timothy Twerdahl, the director of Amazon’s Fire TV division, as a new vice president. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman first reported the news, also saying that Twerdahl will be running the Apple TV business and reporting to Greg Joswiak.

Twerdahl had been at Amazon since 2013, overseeing the launch of the company’s well-received Fire TV products. Before that, he spent time at Netflix on the team that was eventually spun out into Roku, and then worked as product VP at WIMM Labs, the smartwatch startup that Google acquired in 2013.

Bloomberg says that Twerdahl’s new product-oriented role at Apple will free up the previous Apple TV head, Pete Distad, to concentrate on striking content deals under Eddy Cue. The current Apple TV hardware hasn’t changed since its 2015 launch, though Apple has added a couple of headline features; the ambitious new TV app and single sign-on in tvOS 10 have struggled to gain support from content providers.

The article was published on : theverge