Don't give up the dream yet. This has got to be Apple's #1 motivation right now. If it ends up happening, it will be the single biggest news to come from Apple since the original iPhone announcement. I really think it's THAT big. It's the crack in the dam. And once it breaks, it will open up the floodgates and all the other content providers will be beating down Apple's door to get in on the action. That war chest of $137 billion is going to come in plenty handy now to blow up that dam.
Again, I love the dream of it. But even if the deals can somehow be struck with the content creators (and the weight of the entire cable & satt industry risk is somehow mitigated enough for the creators to take the chance), there is still the "last mile" problem of the cableTV-replacement depending on the broadband pipes owned by the very same players that like the cable empire "as is". As such, this is nothing like the iPhone revolution.
Sure, Apple can build a dazzling piece of hardware and a great bit of integrated software (just like they did with iPhone) but the established "empire" of the service provider was not disrupted (we're not paying AT&T, Verizon, etc substantially less than their service cost before iPhone; I think I read somewhere that we are actually paying more on average than pre-iPhone rates).
In this dream, it's even worse. As iPhone was moving toward launch, Apple had a lot of competitors with which to potentially partner. And several of those partners had national reach too. In this cableTV killer dream, many of us consumers have 1 provider of broadband, maybe 2 if we're lucky. How many of us have a broadband provider that is not also in the cable TV business? Even the oft-quote google fiber experiement in Kansas city involves broadband and "broadband +". What's the "+"? I bet you can guess without looking it up.
Even if the content creators could be moved to play ball, how can we imagine the cable TV middlemen rolling over when Apple's solution must flow through
their pipes? I've seen this same kind of movie before. iPad launched with "unlimited" data and then it quickly became tiered plans because of "high bandwidth" users. Why do we imagine this can be any different? $100 cable + $40 broadband now. Dream fulfilled. $10 Apple al-a-carte, commercial-free replacement + $200 broadband bill then.
The other massive mismatch is the illusion that we consumers are going to end up with everything we want for substantially less than we pay now. If the new model is Content Creators + Apple + Us and we are going to pay substantially less than we do now, who is going to take the hit? It can't be Apple (else, why bother?). And again, even if we dream up a way for the Content end to take the hit (and that the quality of their work would somehow not go down... and that there would still be plenty of financial incentive for funding new pilots each year... etc), it's still got to flow through cable TV-owned broadband pipes.
I love the dream. Love it! But these are real problems that aren't solved by big innovations at Apple HQ. The missing rumor is some bypass-the-middleman way to link us to iCloud. When that one is flying, the dream will be less far-fetched to me.
