Mat Clayton, one of the creative minds behind Mixcloud (Includes interview)

Sheffield-born Mat Clayton founded Mixcloud with the intention of making it the home of online radio with friends and fellow Cambridge University graduates Nikhil Shah and Nico Perez in 2008.

Since then, the online music streaming service that receives 13 million listeners a month and permits the distribution of radio shows, DJ mixes and podcasts has gone from strength to strength and even counts US president Barack Obama among its users.

Apple TV, a digital media player developed by Apple Inc. and initially released in 2007, is an appliance that allows a modern, adapted TV to receive digital data from various sources.

Now these two technological giants have joined forces, with Mixcloud providing an app designed to put the tech tastemaker on an equal footing with the likes of Netflix, Vimeo and YouTube, by breaking into the mainstream TV market ahead of competitors such as SoundCloud, Spotify and Deezer.

“It became available just over a week ago as Apple were launching the new Apple TV worldwide, so it was very much there from day one,” explains Clayton, speaking to me from the company’s London office.

“Apple launched an App Store at the same time and it was open for anyone to start building on it,” continues the young entrepreneur, “and we just happened to get ahead of the curve on everyone else and built up the app more quickly.”

What exactly does it do? “Essentially we allow streaming on talk and podcasts… Music is very much select a genre, click play and go and talk is a bit more in-depth. So you can choose which type of music to start playing and then listen to some of the world’s best in that genre.”

The Mixcloud App

Aaron Powell

Providing further information about Apple TV, Clayton says, “I think they’re shipping in about seven or eight major companies right now and will be shipping worldwide shortly… It’s a little unit you plug into your television that takes power from the power socket and plugs into HDMI.

“It then gives you the ability to run apps on it. The original version was on sale for about three years and the new version has the apps. The original was about 80 or 90 dollars and the new one costs about 199 dollars.”

A quick look on Twitter reveals that the reaction to the new app has been largely positive. To conclude, I asked the fan of ambient and chill out music whether he has always had a particular flair for technology.

“My background is very much in the engineering side,” he replies (the two other Mixcloud founders, Nikhil and Nico, are both DJs). “I did electrical engineering as a degree and then moved over to software.”

For more information on Mixcloud, visit their official website.

For more on Apple TV, go here.