Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Report: Apple To Suspend Effort To Develop Live TV Service (bloomberg.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the giving-up-for-now dept.

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."

7 of 71 comments (clear)

  1. Canceled TV service by BitZtream · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
    1. Re:Canceled TV service by 91degrees · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Shrug, congratulations media companies, you just lost to Netflix ... AGAIN.

      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.

  2. Hollywood vs 21st Century by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Hollywood vs 21st Century by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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
    2. Re:Hollywood vs 21st Century by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.'"
  3. channels? live? what is his? 1970??? by citizenr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  4. Re:More what for what? by MachineShedFred · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You're making a huge assumption that those 14 channels are 1980's style cable channels, where you get no say in the programming. What if they added a tab to iTunes where you can drag and drop shows out of a pick list onto a "TV Guide" style grid of your 14 channels, including live sport events?

    That would sure as shit be worth $40/month for me, as long as the content I'm looking for is there.

    --
    Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.