John Paczkowski, reporting for BuzzFeed News:

Sources familiar with Apple’s plans say that a cornerstone of the the company’s new set-top box is a universal search feature that will enable searches across multiple streaming video services as well as Apple’s iTunes Store. Instead of searching the catalogs of multiple video services one at a time for a particular movie, you’ll now be able to search all — or most of them — at once and then choose the service on which you’d like to watch it. […]

One last thing: The new Apple TV will start at $149, the lower of the two price points 9to5Mac first reported.

Myself, last week, predicting the new Apple TV’s major features:

The Apple TV will gain a refreshed user interface and hardware design, an updated remote control, iOS 9-dependent features like universal search, a developer SDK, and App Store.

As for the price point, it’s a bit higher than I’d like. But considering the devices’ powerful internals and impressive features, I can’t say I’m surprised. I’m also not too keen on the possibility of Apple offering two Apple TV models differentiated by internal storage, but Mark Gurman claims that Apple’s at least considered it. Let’s hope Apple settled on a single 16GB model for simplicity’s sake.

And count me in with John Gruber about the curious case of the current Apple TV. It would make sense for Apple to replace the current model with this new one, but more than doubling the price from $69 to $149 is quite the jump. I could see Apple keeping the old model around to retain its low entry price, but without App Store support it’d feel like the non-retina MacBook Pro — something that by all accounts, almost no one should buy.