Apple Announces OSX Integration with China's Leading Internet Television Company Youku at WWDC

PRESS RELEASE

In keynote remarks at the 2012 Apple Worldwide Developer's Conference (WWDC) on June 11, Apple announced that the next versions of Apple's OS X desktop operating system and iOS mobile operating system will integrate with services from Youku Inc. (NYSE:YOKU), China's leading Internet television company ("Youku"), to enable users to quickly and easily share videos to the web.

China accounted for 24% of iOS and Android device activations worldwide in February 2012, more than any other country in the world, according to figures from mobile analytics firm Flurry. Apple's addition of support for video-sharing to Youku and Tudou comes as part of updates intended to solidify and expand the company's share of the China market, which constitutes Apple's second-largest market after the United States. Youku and Tudou entered into an agreement and plan of merger in March 2012 and are working towards completing the merger as soon as possible.

"Ever since Youku announced the 'Year of Paike' in 2007, our slogan has been that Youku's Paike video bloggers are everywhere," said Youku CTO Jian Yao. "Thanks to our new partnership with Apple on video-sharing in iOS 6 and OS X Mountain Lion, that's now truer than ever before."

iOS 6, which Apple said will be released this fall, will also add support for Chinese voice recognition through Siri, as well as greatly improved Chinese text input and handwriting recognition. The update will deepen iOS' integration with China-native web services, as will OS X Mountain Lion, the next version of Apple's desktop operating system, to be released in July.