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The Apple Broadcast Network
Hodejo1 writes "In 1959 5,749,000 television sets were sold in the US, bringing the cumulative total of sets sold since 1950 to 63,542,128 units. This number supported, through advertising, three national television networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS (a fourth, Dumont, folded in 1956) and numerous local independent stations. Now here are another set of numbers. As of April this year Apple sold 75 million iPhone and iPod touch units, devices capable of delivering video via Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity. Add to that figure 2 million iPads and counting. By the end of the year Apple should have about 90 million smart mobile devices in the wild. That makes a proprietary amalgam greater than what the TV networks had in 1959 and one that easily serves as a foundation for a pending broadcast network that will be delivered not through tall radio towers, but through small wireless hubs and the Internet. Call it the Apple Broadcast Network. iAd is how Apple plans to pay for it."
They've already "paid for it" with the bucketloads of cash they've made from selling all the devices.
s of April this year Apple sold 75 million iPhone and iPod touch units, devices capable of delivering video via Wi-Fi and 3G connectivity.
The 3G connectivity is not sufficient for watching video in volume comparable to TV. TV bandwidth is essentially free (a true one-to-many broadcast,) whereas 3G is not (it's limited and shared.)
Even the Wi-Fi connectivity is lacking in many cities, let alone countryside. I think we are a good decade away from being able to depend on our Internet links for reliable, always-on TV viewing.
I told the firehose this link-bait was stupid, not sure why it did not listen. TFA article does not make any sense. There is no meat to it. It does not offer any information. The entire thing is pointless.
BTW there is nothing in the article that is not in the summary, so feel free to comment away without clicking. Not clicking is actually preferable in this case. I would dispute the point of the article, but since it makes no point, it is difficult to dispute. It is also, umm, pointless....
As often happens when someone is trying to support their position, these numbers are exaggerated. A lot of people have bought two iPhones, so there really aren't that many iPhones out in the wild. The phones are not all in the US, either, and an iPod touch with nothing but wifi may not be the best media delivery system.
In other words, if your business plan (or anything real, other than a slashdot story) depends on these numbers, you better dig deeper so you know what you are really dealing with.
Qxe4
How do you get from "people own devices made by X" to "X has a network"? Dumbest. Story. Idea. Ever.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Of course, since there was a story on Microsoft on the front page, we had to see this baseless speculation of a random guy on the net. I suppose everyone wants this stories, because they keep coming...
As for the subject I understand they have a content distribution network called iTunes and it works quite well. They will produce the iFridge before ever creating two competing products. Is there any point at all in this speculation?
Anyone care to enlighten me to why the ___ it matters how many Apple devices there are compared to how many TVs there were in 1959? Somebody playing madlibs with summaries?
Long live the BSD license
I despise how everything I now want to interact with (TV, Internet, video games, the old paper media) must be all based on ads. Can't somebody think of a better way? And if I have a subscription, can't I receive an ad free version. Thank (your favorite deity) for AdBlock and the mute button. I remember a time when there were only two commercial breaks when watching a TV program, now it's four. It sometimes feels like there is more commercials than actual program. I demand that these media outlets pay me for watching these ads. I might actually pay attention to them if I was paid to watch them.
The whole family (which was larger on average back then compared to now) would gather around a single TV to watch together back in 1959. Iphones and even Ipads aren't really conducive to shared viewing like that.
In 1959, the television broadcast networks were competing with... radio? Today, Apple is competing with an enormous number of Windows- (and Linux-, Android-, WebOS-...) based Internet-connected laptops (and desktops, phones, PDAs, tablets...) capable of showing the same quality video. Oh, and with television (broadcast, cables, satellite...), which has grown a bit since 1959.
-puk
Apple has nothing to say that I find worth hearing. Apple has nothing to show that I find worth seeing.
Remember, if you say you like Apple and express interest in their products and services, you are just giving an opinion.
If you say in a non-inflammatory way that you don't like Apple and do not have an interest in their products and services, why then you are "-1, Flamebait".
Yup, nothing hypocritical about that, mods.
Nobody wants to pay to download ads, just like nobody wants to pay to download Wired magazine's 500 megabyte iPad edition (which is what happens when you cancel flash support and leave everyone scrambling).
ravenspear: They've already "paid for it" with the bucketloads of cash they've made from selling all the devices.
dmacleod808: Well said... AT&T's new tiered 3G plans will kill this easily... I can watch unlimited Television for free (broadcast networks of course).
It's interesting that you two are overlooking the same thing from different angles.
ravenspear has neglected to take into account that television is not free to broadcast. Even without government regulations and licensing, you have to have a transmitter, and either a live performance (lights, cameras) and/or some recorded performance (playback hardware) to transmit. The electricity alone would be monstrously expensive, and needs to be paid for somehow (say, advertising).
And you're citing AT&T's tiered plans as being a stopper because you think nobody on the receiving end would pay for the service. How do you watch broadcast television without paying for it? Because the broadcaster pays for the transmitter.
So what would happen if a significant chunk of iAd's revenue went into paying an ISP system or carrier for the bandwidth? I could only see it working this way, if you cast the phone's/pad's/computer's user as the audience, Apple itself as the network, and the ISP (or just one primary choice of ISP) as the nigh-inertial cost of doing business.
I can easily imagine reasons why they wouldn't do this—AT&T's 3G coverage and the fact that the iPhone and similar devices are already straining their networks for two. But then again, I thought the hassles of dealing with a mobile phone carrier would be sufficient to keep the iPhone from becoming a reality, so what do I know?
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
They may have sold that many, but there aren't that many in use. I'm guessing somewhere near 25% of those 75 million (15-18 million) are out of use. (damaged or retired/upgraded)
Not that it matters really to the story, just making it know that the numbers are overstated.
"In 1959 5,749,000 television sets were sold in the US, bringing the cumulative total of sets sold since 1950 to 63,542,128 units."
There are 300 + Million people in the U.S. and you're telling me that only 63.5 million sets have been sold from 1950 to now???
I call Bullshit.
"By 1960, there were 52 million sets in American homes, one in almost nine out of ten households."
Jordan, Winthrop. The Americans. Boston: McDougal Littell, 1996: 798.
"According to data from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), there are currently 285 million televisions in use in US households."
North American TV Market and Its Relevance [pdf]. Energy Star Research, 6 January 2006.
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
The reason Apple is doing iAds is to improve the experience of in-app ads. User like free and $1-2 apps, and so developers have been putting ads in their apps and the ads are very basic and they take you out to the Web. So iAds are advertising-focused mini HTML5 apps that run inside native C apps, and keep you in your app.
If used in a media app, they may support media, like a free Hulu app. But they work on all kinds of apps.
Besides, $8.99 a month for Netflix on iPad absolutely destroys Hulu. There is no shortage of TV already on Apple devices.
this whole story is just stupid, has /. run out of real stories and resorted to recycling crap from mac rumor forums or something?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
That's 90 million people (with a good income) who won't be seeing anything designed in Flash.
If that's not a good reason to stop using Flash on websites, I don't know what is. If you're an advertiser, and you use those annoying Flash ads that we all hate, then it's time to change, or die.
I may not agree with all of Apple's reasons for not using Flash, but I sure as hell love the result.
People don't buy phones to watch TV. They buy, well, TVs.
I do not get this idea that retards in the press have that TVs and computers are going to go away and be replaced with phones. No, they aren't. It isn't a matter of technology, it is a matter of convenience and features. Yes, modern smartphones have no problem displaying SD video, and you can surf the web on them. No, that doesn't mean you want to use only them.
I just bought a new TV, it is a nice 46" LCD TV. Why did I do that, if my phone could play media? Because I want a 46" TV. When I want TV I want to sack out on my couch and have a nice large screen to watch on. I do not want to have to hold a phone right up to my face to see what is going on. For that matter I don't even want to watch on my computer. My computer has a nice screen, and it is plenty large for using close up, but I don't want to sit in my computer chair all the time. Likewise, it wouldn't work well to move the system out in to the living room and try to use it there. Hence, I have a TV. Even though I have other devices that could technically fulfill its function, they do not have the features, namely the size, that I want.
I certainly think people will continue to consume media on their portable devices. After all, if you are in the doctor's office waiting it is convenient to have a device in your pocket that can entertain you. However that doesn't mean it'll become the primary or major way people get their media.
A big problem, in terms of streaming to mobile phones, is that pesky little thing called Shannon's Law. It states that the amount of information you can get in a given channel equals the bandwidth (in Hz) of the channel times the log of the signal to noise ratio. Well this is a real problem for high speed sustained wireless. The frequencies you are working with aren't that wide. When you are working in the 1900MHz range, you can only have channels that are tens of MHz wide. You can't have 1GHz channels or anything. Also, because of the low signal levels (-80dBm or less generally) your SNR sucks. 20dB at best, and it can be as low as 6dB for GSM. That equals not a whole lot of bandwidth. Now it can be fine when people use it in spurts. You allow someone to use a bunch of channels and get a big transfer, then someone else can use them. However if everyone is trying to sustain downloads, as is the case in streaming media, you simply run out of bandwidth.
Unfortunately, just upping the frequency isn't a solution either. The higher the frequency, the less penetrating power it has, and the more line of sight it is. A 100GHz signal could have great bandwidth, but won't even go through a wall. So in the frequency ranges that are useful, there's just only so much bandwidth you get.
As such, you aren't likely to see anything replace TV and cable/fibre as the main video content delivery for most people. It is simply a nice way to watch. Phones will remain a peripheral device, used occasionally but not the main thing.
Either I missed a major news release and this was a bad article or... this is all merely speculation. Sure, I could see Apple rolling out an advertising system, it's already been mentioned vaguely before, especially since they could lock your system for the ads if they wanted to, it's just... unless it was specifically tied to certain sources of content, forcing adverts on everyone's devices could really start a slow backlash towards Apple on their level of control on the devices.
At least... I think this sort of thing until I look at the control they already have on the devices, and see the possibility of adverts as just another step down the road that everyone will unthinkingly take.
If you say in a non-inflammatory way that you don't like Apple and do not have an interest in their products and services, why then you are "-1, Flamebait".
That also applies if you say something in favor of the App Store, or the iPhone in general in comparison to Android. Or anything negative about Android.
In other words, welcome to the Internet, where if you say anything that someone disagrees with, you run the risk of -1 Flamebait/Troll.
As for the OP AC, his post is flamebait/troll. His post, in its entirety is:
Subj: Do not need. Do not want.
Body: Apple has nothing to say that I find worth hearing. Apple has nothing to show that I find worth seeing.
No real content other than, "I hate Apple." Flamebait/Troll would apply to pretty much any topic with such a post. Android, Google, Microsoft, Linux, you name it. Maybe about BP it would get a pass...
Also, those that say things like "Apple should allow Flash" seem to be ignorant of the fact that Flash is not on a single handheld device, except as a very recent beta for Android.
Not true. Flash Lite is already shipping on some phones, including the HTC Hero and Evo. It's not Flash Player 10.1, which is the beta you mentioned (and that beta is available for Android 2.2 users to try for themselves), but it's enough for many popular sites.
Cocoa Touch on the iPhone OS. As well as HTML5. There are zero cases where Flash is technologically better than both of those.
Flash is more portable than Cocoa Touch. It's more powerful than HTML5 and also has better development/design tools.
It's also far from clear that supporting Flash would be to Apple's benefit, and a watered-down version would be even worse.
Apple's benefit? Of course, they'd rather have you use their proprietary APIs. But isn't their customers' benefit what really matters?
As for the watered-down version: again, you're ignoring Flash Lite, which is certainly better than no Flash at all.
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Ever since Jobs returned, Apple has been about delivering content. They didn't want to take over enterprise, they wanted to take over Hollywood. I think it would be a great idea if Apple could compete with the cable companies. Most cable companies have no competition within their regions and can gouge us at will. We need Apple or some other entity to challenge them.
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