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Report: Apple To Suspend Effort To Develop Live TV Service (bloomberg.com)
schwit1 sends word that Apple has reportedly suspended plans to offer a live internet-based television service and will focus on being a platform for media companies to sell directly to customers through its App Store instead. Bloomberg reports: "Apple Inc. has suspended plans to offer a live Internet-based television service and is instead focusing on being a platform for media companies to sell directly to customers through its App Store, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. While Apple isn't giving up entirely on releasing a live-TV service, its plan to sell a package of 14 or so channels for $30 to $40 a month has run into resistance from media companies that want more money for their programming, said the person, who asked not to be named discussing a prospective product."
"its plan to sell a package of 14 or so channels for $30 to $40 a month has run into resistance from media companies that want more money for their programming" ...its plan to sell a package of 14 or so channels for $30 to $40 a month has run into resistance from potential subscribers that want more programming for their money,
Fixed that for ya.
Sorry, but for $40 a month I'd sure as hell want more than 14 channels. Talk about being clueless in the marketplace. Hulu, Netfilx, etc all offer much more bang for the buck. Admittedly TV in general has less value to me than it does for a lot of people, but $40 a month for 14 channels just seems ridiculously overpriced to me.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
TV companies have seen what happened to music companies and want to avoid the same fate. Streaming music platforms like Spotify are extremely popular, but they also pay next to nothing to creators and even the labels are not getting nearly as much as they wanted. So TV companies are just holding out and hoping that they can find some way to make people pay premium prices for their mostly worthless content.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This is probably why Apple isn't interested. They figure broadcast TV is losing popularity, especially with their current tech-aware customer base. They can afford to say "no" to this.
The problem is, the TV companies are just sitting around doing nothing with most of their old content, when they could be doing almost anything else with it and still coming out ahead. They could license it to amazon and/or netflix, for example, on a limited-time basis with yearly renewal. It's like printing money.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"