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DirecTV CEO Scoffs At Competition From Apple TV
theodp writes "In a move that evokes memories of Steve Ballmer's initial pooh-poohing of the iPhone threat, DirecTV Chairman Michael White downplayed the Apple TV hype, expressing doubts that 'Apple's interface will be so much better than DirecTVs' that people will be willing to pay for an extra box. So, will White's statement — 'It's hard to see (it) obsoleting our technology' — come back to haunt him?"
While DirecTV's Chairman is crowing about his viewers lacking an interest in paying for an "extra box" on top of what he provides? Viewers will continue to drop DirecTV service completely, once they use boxes like AppleTV and realize they're saving a lot of money by streaming video content and doing "pay only for what you want to watch" with iTunes store movie or TV series purchases/rentals. So yeah, he's right... They only want one set-top box. Increasingly, it won't be his.
Given all the rumours, it sounds more and more likely that Apple will be releasing an actual TV set of one sort or another. That wouldn't be an "extra box," it would just be a replacement TV.
I wonder what Mr. White would think of the chances of that sort of "Apple TV"?
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
I could be wrong, but laying on a couch and talking to your TV for hours on end has the potential to be a soul-deadening experience.
He should be VERY careful about what Apple initiatives he dismisses so blithely. A lot of giants have fallen with such an attitude and we're all better for it.
RIM thought the very same thing until Apple handed them their ass.
Got Code?
At one time hooked to our TV was a DirecTV box only. Today we have (in order of usage):
- Apple TV. This is what the kids hit first when looking for something to watch. Mostly Netflix cartoons, our Vimeo home videos, and our Photo Stream. We have never purchased or rented a program from Apple!
- XBox with Kinect for a gaming fix.
- Old re-purposed Dell. This is full of all the DVD's I did not want my kids destroying (locked safely away, and yes we do own them), and a way to access anything on the net the first two don't.
- A real antenna. Sports look horrible on my friends HDTV with all the compression! (needs fed through the computer... someday).
I would be OK with just the first two if Apple would open the interface up for more content. I would happily pay a small ($1-5) monthly fee for channels such as Discovery, Science, etc. I'm guessing this will only happen once these channels are replaced by new content producers that are 'net only.
The "PC" guys figured out that the best phone wasn't a complex phone but a small screen computer. Maybe they are also figuring that the best TV isn't a complex TV but a big screen computer.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
You know, I don't own any Apple products, and I don't particularly have any plans to at this particular moment. (Not that I have anything against it.) But is there seriously no other company in the industry competent enough to step into a market and kick everyone in the ass in the way Apple has been doing? Music players, phones, tablets, ultrabooks, etc., and now potentially TVs. Where will the industry go after TVs? Or will Apple have to hold everyone's hands in that adventure too?
"TV, I'd like to watch 'Boardwalk Empire'"
"Mobile Tata - I don't understand boardwalk empire."
"TV, play 'Boardwalk Empire'"
"I couldn't find 'Boardwalk Empire' in your music, Mobile Tata.
"Oh fuck it, make me some popcorn"
"I'd blush if I could"
Somehow, I don't see this as working out too well
(Dialog pulled directly from yeah-but-it's-still-a-beta Siri)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
So, will White's statement — 'It's hard to see (it) obsoleting our technology' — come back to haunt him?
Short answer: No.
The CEO of DirecTV obviously has better intel about the TV/video distribution market, than any slashdotter posting here.
Is AppleTV a threat to them? I don't know, and it really doesn't matter. For the sake of argument, let's pretend that AppleTV is a huge threat, and that DirecTV is doomed, and one man, even the CEO, cannot effect the sweeping market changes to reverse this course.
White's motivation, as with any CEO of a publicly-traded company in the Wall St system, is to maximize his income. He does that by keeping the stock price as high as possible, for as long as possible, even in the face of a known inevitable demise. Then when profitability is clearly compromised, he can collect large compensation for sticking with a "troubled company". Or just jump immediately to the next company. Rinse, repeat, retire.
This is the way the current system works. The CEO is not an "idiot" for not publicly recognizing threats that he/she absolutely knows about. Quite the contrary. His behavior is "smart". It's the overall rules of the system that are "dumb".
...I've been a directv subscriber since around 1994 when they had 50,000 customers and have their current HD DVR technology.
Pro's: nice picture quality, lots of channels, plenty of downloadable shows.
Cons: Cant stream anything except youtube from a search. No netflix. No hulu. Have to download all shows which can take quite a while and can only start viewing when you have buffered a lot. Most hardware platforms are slower than molasses going uphill on a cold monday morning, and if your brand new HR24 craps out, chances are they'll ship you a replacement HR 20/21/22 that are basically too slow to use. You hit a button on the remote and a while later something happens. Completely opposed to and unsupporting of anything coming through the box that isn't directv supplied and branded.
In short, unacceptable for 2012, poised for a major faceplant from someone elses set top box. Obstructionism and protectionism only work until someone has something as good for less money that works better. I don't think thats Apple TV because I can't see anyone seriously spending a couple of bucks per tv show. Netflix and hulu are incomplete. But as soon as someone puts out a streaming package with full sports, all local broadcast and pretty much everything I can get from directv minus the big dish and tons of wires and little boxes for under $100...directv will start hemorrhaging money and subscribers.
Having had the chance to speak to a number of directv senior and middle management, they consider the customer a barely necessary evil and have absolutely no idea as to how to treat customers. When you're the best show in town, you can get away with that.
If Michael White is that stupid then it explains a lot. The Direct TV UI is completely horrid in every way. The guide sucks the menus suck, the remote sucks. It's better than the garbage that Comcast has, but only marginally. All of the Cable or Satellite providers have the crappiest UI possible on their boxes. Because they refuse to spend any money on them so they have the box engineers simply slap one together for the least possible cost.
Apple is going to wipe the floor with them. If apple finds a way to have a $45.00 a month subscription to most of the desired channels out there but in a On demand form, They will utterly destroy Dish and the others.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
DirecTV, along with cable, have this model where you have to buy channels by the package not a la carte. So out of 200 channels maybe there are 10 that you watch regularly. Not only that but the default setting on DirecTV is to also show you the channels that you DON'T get to entice you to get them. This all plays in to the prevailing American mentality of "more is better". Big house, big SUV, big refrigerators, big everything. This is why Costco is so successful. Why buy 2 rolls of paper towel when you can buy 50? What does this have to do with DirecTV you might ask? I believe that there is a psychological comfort that people get with 200 channels even if you don't watch most of them. If it got pared down to just the channels you want I think that many people would feel cheated. "What...only 10 channels? But my buddy has 200!!". Unfortunately the wasteful-hoarder mentality works against the just-get-what-you-need mentality. I see this time and time again. People driving down the street in 9 passenger vehicles alone. People in the grocery store with enormous carts full of food. People buying big houses only to have several of the rooms never used. I'd love to see a la carte programming but I just don't see it catching on for the reasons above.
No, but he should take Andy Grove's advice, "Only the Paranoid Survive". It's a book he should read.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Currently...true.
But what's to say that Apple isn't courting HBO and the like to be able to stream them through and AppleTV or like device?
As long as HBO get's their money, and potentially more customers...why would they not jump at this opportunity?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
What this is fucking free ride you are mumbling about? I paid for my pipe, and though it may be shared with my neighbors, it's none of your fucking business where I suck down my content from.
You are an idiot.
You had a nice rebuttal. The name calling was unnecessary and makes you look like the idiot. Try and just stick to your argument, youll get much farther in life...
Wikipedia says:
Year Subscribers
1994 320,000
1995 1,200,000
1996 2,300,000
1997 3,301,000
1998 4,458,000
1999 6,679,000
2000 9,554,000
2001 10,218,000
2002 11,181,000
2003 12,290,000
2004 13,000,000
2005 15,000,000
2006 15,950,000
2007 16,830,000
2008 17,620,000
2009 18,081,000
2010 19,200,000
2011 19,890,000 (DTV was hurt by the NFL lockout in 2011)
And they are expanding their service into Latin America.
I somehow think (and expect) that Apple knows this and has more "up it's sleeve" than what any of us are guessing...
Comcast 300GB and then $10 per 50GB.
HD IPTV can burn cap fast and haveing HSI without cable tv costs more then HSI with cable tv.
Hi, welcome to the 21st century. I see you have just arrived. I know this will seem very strange to you 20th century visitors, but here's the deal: HBO doesn't give a damn about getting their money, except maybe in terms of discouraging it from happening. None of the media companies do. Their main business model is that whenever a customer comes to them and waves money in their face, the media company's response is "Fuck you! Get that fucking money out of my fucking face."
HBO is only going to be interested in this, if it comes with some assurance that customers will be unhappy, and will have increased motivation to stop sending their monthly checks.
The video industries know what Apple did to the poor bastards in music, who were all trying to go out of business but are now burdened with so many accursed sales directly trackable to Apple's store. Forewarned MPAA companies are not going to have their suicides sabotaged the same way -- they're not that oblivious.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Something like, "If Apple focuses on your market, you better focus too". Apple has an unequivocal track record of being a major disruptive influence on any consumer market they choose to enter. Music players. Music industries. Phones. They may not dominate any given market, but they sure as hell disrupt it.
I have to say that I'm actually glad for this. All these markets have essentially been static and stagnant with the incumbents doing the same crap without any real innovation. Then Apple waltzes in and suddenly everything gets really interesting. The phone arena is particularly interesting, because we get to watch the relatively long-lived incumbents (eg RIM, Nokia) thrash, crash and burn in slow motion while everyone looks on and says to themselves, "Wow, I can't believe we put up with the crap they've been peddling for so long!"
How else is he supposed react to not only a product that doesn't exist, but one that hasn't even been announced? Panic? People (not necessarily here) mocked Jeff Bezos when he dismissed the threat of the iPad and iBooks to his Kindle business. And guess what? A couple years into it and Bezos was right. Furthermore, let's be honest with ourselves, Apple knows how to do R&D: fail as often as you succeed but when you win, win big. They have had notable failures. Look no further than, well, Apple TV. Their desktop business never got traction. iBooks is basically a failure. They screwed up the nano and backtracked. So their successes we all know about and think about, but they have felt what failure feels like too. Now, maybe this new "doesn't exist thing" will change the world but maybe it won't. HDTV sales have completely stagnated in the US. Penetration is high and the need to upgrade a 4 year old 50" tv is small. I don't think an updated UI is the difference, nor is the ability to rent on demand. As for DirecTV, I have it and enjoy it. I'm not married to it, but nothing about paying Apple's fees is particularly compelling. I get my free Amazon Prime Instant Video as well as the choice to rent stuff not free. And DTV has NFL Sunday Ticket, which is the bees knees for an out-of-town fan. I like FIOS too. I'd rather chew ground glass than go back to Comcast though. For me to spend $1500 in replacement costs, it's going to have to be a whole lot more than widgets, streaming and a slick UI. YMMV.
DirecTV is the player that has all the pieces.
It's Apple and the rest of the cabal that don't have all of the pieces. ALL of them are at the mercy of content owners that may not want to cooperate and network owners that may not want to cooperate.
Those are also the same companies that are the incumbents.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
No. But a full blown AppleTV can be dismissed as a toy for not being able to tune or decode a TV broadcast, play a raw DVD or BD file, or play your very own home videos just pulled off your USB camera or smartphone.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
But is there seriously no other company in the industry competent enough to step into a market and kick everyone in the ass in the way Apple has been doing?
Apparently not. From my reading of the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, who appears to be a detached, more-or-less objective outsider with no dog in the fight, it appears that media industry executives really are the overpaid imbeciles that we've always suspected they were. Or, more accurately and less facetiously, they're the laziest fuckers this side of Mars.
On both the production and distribution side, the media companies are run by overgrown fratboys who could just as easily have gone into fast food franchising or insurance underwriting. Without some messianic figure to tell them where to go, what to do, how to do it, and how to zip their pants up when they're done, they really are completely hopeless. You can count on these people to behave self-destructively in the absence of adult supervision.
It apparently took every hand-waving, smoke-blowing, reality-distorting trick in Jobs's repertoire to get the music people on board with iTunes, and to keep Disney from destroying Pixar. Tim Cook is OK at the business of running Apple, but he is no Steve Jobs, and it's not clear who is going to pull the media companies' asses out of the fire this time.
For a while I thought Reed Hastings might be the one to step in and drive the necessary changes. But he's more like Steve the Grey than Steve the White. Jeff Bezos? Who knows.
I wouldn't count on anything to change soon.
There are other devices that do much much more. Roku is the Swiss Army Knife of such appliances - and integrates popular services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video as well as less popular stuff like MLB.TV, Crackle and several dozen others. It's silly that White thought of comparing himself with Apple TV, when the true competition he ought to have been comparing himself with is Roku. In the long run, it's inevitable that White will be proven wrong. In the short to medium run, I think he will continue being right. It will take some time before content owners become comfortable with streaming options. For now, we are stuck with nonsensical paywalls like the one set up by HBO GO, but eventually the types of Netflix and Hulu, and PPV systems like iTunes and Amazon Video will slowly take over. In another generation (or two), the new breed of users will see online as normative, and that will accelerate the demise of DirectTV and Cable companies. I expect Cable companies be hold out longer than DirectTV, because they will continue owning valuable copper that also supports internet services.
-- obligatory (but true) caveat: my comments my own, and don't reflect my employer or colleagues' positions.
A $1,500 50" TV is not likely to sell like hotcakes. If Apple holds to their current pattern he's got time to react.
Some people thought the same thing in regards to the iPhone. Ask a couple companies, RIM first among them, how that worked out.
If they aren't already reacting in some way or another, it's already too late.
In all of 2011, when the Apple TV did not see an update, the company sold a total of 2.8 million devices in the 12-month span. But the company is easily on pace to beat that, with 2.7 million sold through the first five months of 2012.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
You are talking about one heavily subsidized comm device versus another one.
I bet you like to whine about how "Android devices are cheap" too.
People generally do not pay full price for phones and there is no one to subsidize the cost of a TV.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
iTunes is fine if it has what you watch.
As far as TV goes, there is very little you cannot get between iTunes and Netflix.
Even HBO is present, though on substantial delay (1 year wait for game of thrones on iTunes).
But if you are simply wiling to wait a while for TV shows there is almost no gap. And even for current stuff if you throw in Hulu you'd probably only be missing HBO.
So basically, all Apple has to do is bribe HBO, and get Hulu working with Apple TV to give users a box that should make DirectTV worry... that and support either OTA HD or some other way to get live sports (the real gap at the moment between the hell of cable/satellite TV boxes and freedom).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley