English Premier League official app on Apple TV? Wouldn’t it be great to be just two clicks away from fantastic games like yesterday’s City’s impressive victory against Liverpool? Daily Mail reports that Apple is considering bidding for the TV rights to show live Premier League football. The Mail claims that “the Premier League is seen as the type of premium content that will help establish Apple TV in the UK and boost iPad sales.” According to DM, the three certain bidders will be Sky (who paid £1.6billion for their current packages), ESPN and Al Jezeera. The Mail also suggests that Google could be interested in the EPL rights for its Google TV, which is due to launch in the UK and Europe this year.

Apple TV users are currently offered subscription services to NBA, NHL and MLB content (live and in HD) through dedicated apps. Available are live and on-demand games with an NBA League Pass Broadband, NHL GameCenter and MLB.TV subscriptions. If you don’t have a subscription you can still get team schedules and real-time scores, standings, and stats — both in-game and full-season — all free.

At the moment, you can watch Premier League matches live via XBMC plugin called LiveOnlineFooty. It’s a paid subscription service (3£ per month) but, unfortunately, they are not currently accepting any new registrations.

UPDATE: According to The Guardian, Apple has not even discussed bidding for the rights to show live Premier League football and is unlikely to do so. “Its model relies on taking a cut of the revenue from existing content producers by retailing its content through its App Store or iTunes service. Sky already shows its live matches on Apple devices through its SkyGo application, and the Premier League has a deal to sell packages of archive content through iTunes,” reports the newspaper. The Guardian said Google, which owns YouTube, “is considered a more likely bidder.”

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Visit What's on iPhone for the best iPad and iPhone app reviews!
Do you want to feel like a wizard? Check the Kymera wand in Amazon: You can control your Apple TV waving a wand!

Little by little the apps are coming to the Apple TV. Hacker and iOS developer Steven Troughton-Smith and a hacker called TheMudKip have made it to run iPhone and iPad apps on an Apple TV 2, jailbroken with Seas0nPass. Using @TheMudkip’s MobileX window manager for iOS, and @chpwn’s MobileLaunchpad launcher to go with it, they managed to get multiple iOS apps running natively on Apple TV, without AirPlay. Later on, they even figured out a way to run iPad applications at a full 720p resolution.

Using a custom springboard, the software that powers the app launcher, also allowed for another new feature: side-by-side apps. This lets you see on the big screen all the applications running at a time, e.g. different chat applications.

“Nick had written this amazing window manager for the iPad that replaced the entire homescreen, allowing you to run multiple apps side by side, and I realized this could enable iOS apps on the Apple TV for the first time. We’ve spent the past 2 days modifying everything to work really well on the Apple TV screen size, etc, and getting apps to run,” Troughten-Smith told CNET.

Since the Apple TV doesn’t have a touch screen, the hackers are using a combination of VNC, SSH and the Apple Remote to launch and navigate apps. However, Troughton-Smith said he is working to make it Apple remote-only.

The hack isn’t publically available yet. For any enterprising hackers who want to make a UIKit Apple TV app, Troughton-Smith published an input library needed to get started (to add Apple TV IR input to an iOS app).

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Visit What's on iPhone for the best iPad and iPhone app reviews!
Do you want to feel like a wizard? Check the Kymera wand in Amazon: You can control your Apple TV waving a wand!