As TMO reported Tuesday, Apple missed its promised “end of October” launch window for the company’s iTunes Match music service. Without directly commenting on the broken promise, Apple alerted iOS developers Wednesday evening to a new iTunes Match “beta update” that brings the service to Apple TV.
The new beta for iTunes Match comes alongside an updated iTunes 10.5.1 beta 2, which is required for continued use of the service by developers. Apple also continued to remind developers not to delete iCloud stored music from their computers, indicating that the service will once again be purged before going live.
While there has been no comment from Apple regarding the delayed launch, several theories have emerged. Dan Moren at Macworld suggested that Apple is not yet satisfied with the service, and wants to perfect it before launching, to avoid problems of the sort encountered by the MobileMe launch.
The Next Web’s Matthew Panzarino wrote that licensing issues with the record labels may be to blame, citing the difficulties in licensing streaming rights reported by services such as Spotify and Rdio. He also suggested that Siri’s launch and its related network congestion issues may have resulted in a reallocation of resources away from iTunes Match. It would not be the first time that Apple delayed a product to allocate resources to something else.
As of this writing, Apple has not set a new date for launching the service to consumers.