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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."
I recently canceled my service because I was paying too much for cable ... and now you're telling me that APPLE doesn't want to charge enough?
Shrug, congratulations media companies, you just lost to Netflix ... AGAIN.
What the fuck will it take to get through your thick ass skulls that we are not going to continue paying for your shitty commercial laden bullcrap. From this point on, I will pay for service or I will watch 1 or 2 commercials per hour, and not if they are mixed into the middle of the show. And I'm not going to pay you some ridiculous sum of money for it. Probably less than a dollar per 'channel', no way in hell I'm giving you more than a dime a month per show I watch, you simply aren't worth it.
So go ahead, try to sell people your spammy wares with little to no content at ridiculous prices. The sooner you die and stop bribing and manipulating to get your way, the sooner we can move on.
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TV networks have no idea what to make of streaming technology. Some of them get the idea that they can use the Internet to extend their TV audience to people on the Internet, but are so divided on how to go about it no delivery model has emerged that is consistent enough to be usable by a make-it-simple company like Apple.
Even the simplest case, over-the-air network recent episodes, is a rickety hash. Sometimes you can stream the latest several episodes of a given show. Sometimes you have to wait a week, and sometimes your favorite show is just not available for streaming at all. Sometimes you have to "verify your cable provider" for an over-the-air show! Streaming could have been the OTA networks' natural way of extending their working commercial-sponsored business model to the huge audience of people who are semi-regular TV watchers who occasionally miss an episode.
Cable networks could capture the cord-cutter market by offering their content to existing subscription services. Some do, each with its own idiosyncratic interface, while most operate with the comforting assumption taht most people will pay a separate subscription fee for each cable channel they stream. And what about streaming by those who still subscribe to cable? You have to hope that the skimpy pulldown in the "Verify Your Provider" list will eventually include your own cable company.
Small wonder that today's busy young people just shrug and get into the habit of torrenting everything. And once you have gotten used to that model and its more consistent interface, they won't be back.
"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...
Sorry, but for $40 a month I'd sure as hell want more than 14 channels.
That depends heavily on the content of the 14 channels. I think most people don't really watch many more than that now. I know I do not. If there is good value in the 14 channels and I get to customize them to my particular tastes then it might be worth it. Your mileage may vary. If it is just the same swill I get from the cable companies now then I'm not interested.
Right now I pay about $30ish/month for some basic cable channels and about $90/month for 100 megabit internet. Guess which one I care about more? So yeah, I'd consider paying $30-40/month for a group of channels I'd watch a lot and which could replace my cable subscription but I'm not about to pay more than I am now. Currently I get about 150 channels, 90% of which I never, ever watch because they are shit and the things I do watch get recorded on my DVR. I pretty much never watch live TV, and frankly why would I? So I can get bombarded with ads? No thanks. I value my time more than that. I have no interest in the latest Kardashian family hijinks so don't waste the bandwidth sending it to me.
So there's the deal I want on the table. 15-30 channels of content (movies and other programming) *I* want to watch and that *I* get to pick with no ads that is easily searchable and which I can watch at a time and place that is convenient to me. And I'm not willing to pay more than $40/month for that. That's the deal, take it or leave it.
This could simply be a negotiation step by Apple to get the price more in line with value.
I watch what I want when I want it, not what/when live feed tells me to.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Exactly.
The only reason I still have a cable TV subscription at all is for live sports. If ESPN went direct-to-Internet streaming without the cable company's paywall in the way, I'd tell Time Warner to go pound sand. I don't even care about "seeing the latest episode when it airs" because watching it via DVR is a monumentally better watching experience.
Cable and Satellite companies need to stop living in the 1980s already. The smartest thing the distribution networks (cable, satellite, etc.) could do is side with the consumers and break bundling agreements. Then they could offer what we really want - a la carte channel service. They'd save shitloads of bandwidth they could use on services we want (faster data, higher quality video), and we could get services from them we actually want.
As I posted above, I'd happily pay for ~20 channel service if I could pick what channels they are, and they are delivered without color dithering and compression artifacts. That would be far superior to 1500+ channels, where 1450 of them are complete shit, and the other 50 are 50% shit, and 100% of them are compressed to hell and back.
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What you speak of when it comes to siding with the consumers and breaking bundling is great in theory, but this is an example of prisoners dilemma. Any one cable company knows they can't take on Disney/Turner/etc in forcing unbundling because Disney can just smile, drop ESPN, and watch the cable/satTV customers go racing to one of the satellite TV providers or back to cable, and leaving the cable/satTV company screwed. Disney is the worst of the bundlers because they have ESPN, so they force all the other shit down the cable/sat companies throats.
Until the FCC rules such bundling to be illegal, the content companies can continue to play the various cable companies and sat TV companies against each other. This is the main idea behind the various mergers in providers, to reduce the number of entities that can played against each other. In terms of customer choice, it is awful, and is bullshit. But from a content negotiation point of view, the bigger you are, the bigger the club you can wield, and the content providers are effectively a cartel, so the transport providers are bulking up as well.
For this reason, Netflix and other streamers, once they overtake cable/satTV in terms of viewers, will get the harsh end of this same stick. Mind you, they know this, hence both Netflix and Amazon are becoming content creators themselves, to avoid the same fate of being held over the barrel. Disney could easily play Netflix against Amazon, and force bundling on both of them.
And a lot of good programming goes down the drain.
Right now, a cable channel has two sources of funding - subscribers and ads. Take away subscribers and they move to ads. Guess what? Ads require eyeballs, and eyeballs require lowest-common-denominator - this is QUANTITY of eyeballs, not quality.
So your favorite programming will start having more crap added for "drama" and "suspense" purely because that crap is what eyeballs care about.
The networks are already prepared for this - they've been preparing for years - if you haven't seen cross-network promotion (where a show is advertised on other channels), that's what's going on - they're getting viewers to move to those lesser watched channels.
And good shows are finding funding squeezed - they're forced to integrate lame "drama" style scenes because people don't care about the content of the show.
Hell, Mythbusters suffered from it - because eyeballs don't care about the build, or the science, they just want the explosions and all that.
Ever wonder why PBS content is always so highly rated? Because they don't care for eyeballs. So they're freed up from having to appeal for eyeballs and can produce programming that's informative without having to inject an explosion every 5 minutes, or some whiny person asking for attention or other crap.
Sure, most of the crap programming goes away, but a lot of the good ones do too. And a lot of the bottom of the barrel crap won't go away. Because that stuff brings in eyeballs.
Reality TV is the same - it brings in the eyeballs.
Subscription services like Netflix will prosper, as they don't have to worry about eyeballs - they only need subscribers. And all Netflix does is make sure they target those who would subscribe. But that also means their programming is subject to the whims of who pays for the service...