Netflix is far ahead of Apple in online delivery of movies. They already have a huge subscriber base with DVD rentals, now those subscribers watch them online as well.
Just because Apple sold a lot of set-top boxes, doesn't mean they are selling a lot of TV shows and movies. Don't forget Direct TV, Comcast, Time Warner also offer On Demand purchasing of movies.
Hulu and Fancast are way out front of Apple on delivery of TV shows.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-10459494-261.html
Again, what? First of all, Netflix is a competing
platform to iTunes not the Apple TV.
And we have no idea how many of Netflix’s subscribers actually watch Netflix streaming movies. All we know from their earnings call is roughly 48 percent of their 12 million customers have “used” Netflix streaming with the vast majority of those subscribers accessing streaming via their PC.
In comparison, Apple has roughly 125 million iTunes customers worldwide with an iTunes catalog of over 12 million songs, over 55,000 TV episodes and over 8,500 movies.
As for iTunes sales, all we know is that as of:
02/25/10: 10 billion songs have been sold
01/05/10: 3 billion Apps have been downloaded
10/16/
08: 200 million TV shows have been sold
08/14/
08: iTunes customers are renting or purchasing over 50,000 movies per day
I couldn’t find up to date statistics on TV shows or movies. Maybe someone else can. Needless to say, if they maintained their pace from 2008 — it’s a lot.
You don’t see actual iTunes Store competitors like Amazon Unbox, PSN or Zune Marketplace coming out with numbers like that.
Where do these sales figures comes from? Apple? Found places on next where some "analyst" predicted sales of 6 million but where is the retail units shipped numbers to back this up?
We don’t know because Apple doesn’t officially release numbers for unit sales other than the iPhone and the iPod touch (whenever they feel like it).
Unit sales are never broken down by product (not for Macs, not for iPods and not for accessories).
The 6.6 million number came from Piper-Jeffrey analyst Gene Munster and has been quoted by the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, CNBC and New York Times.
You would think if Munster was way off Apple would have came out and said something.
"Munster expects Apple to sell 6.6 million Apple TVs in calendar 2009, up from an estimated 2.1 million in 2008 — an estimate of 3X growth that he believes may be conservative. By his calculation, every addition 1 million units Apple sells adds $.03 to Apple's EPS.”
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/08/20/munster-an-apple-television-set-by-2011/
Errr. how about Tivo? (around 3 million subscribers. granted the TivoHD units are a fraction of that but it is a competitor.)
Likewise about the several million cable DVR/OnDemand boxes out there. Those aren't competitors???? Seriously?
PS3 and Xbox360 streaming Netflix .... can't possible be competitors either huh?
As far as cable and satellite providers, I think they’re in a league of their own. These new generation of devices aren’t looking to compete directly with them or the DVR market for that matter.
As for TiVo, sure they’re an Apple TV competitor. TiVo now does YouTube and movie rentals and purchases via Unbox and Netflix. TiVo has sort of positioned themselves as a hybrid between the two (although if you look at their subscription base — they’re hurting badly).
http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/11/25/sad-eyed-tivo-of-the-low-subscriber-rate/
The Apple TV, Boxee Box, Roku box, Vudu box and other set-top Internet boxes for consuming media content are a
new product category.
The 360 and PS3 (which I both mentioned in my earlier post by the way) are harder to judge. I’m not sure if people
just purchase those products as set-top boxes, and there’s no way Sony or Microsoft is going to break that out — it’s more of a value add to them.
For the record, Jobs pretty much lined out who they were competing against with the Apple TV at Macworld ’08.