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Apple Could Offer HBO, Showtime, and Starz Channels as 'Premium TV Bundle'
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Well of course there has been a popular variant of that in the past --entertainment on DVDs-- and Apple was among the first to kill the optical drive on which to watch them...
So maybe that's increasingly in the rear view for media now, but the way these content managers are heading, it's possible consumer resentment will revive popularity of those discs again.
All I know for sure is that I'm not going to shell out for TV/movie subscriptions past Netflix and whatever Prime has on tap for streaming. Music is something else again and by now you'd have to pry my Apple Music sub out of my budget. But bundles of TV channels, no. That's why I had my house uncabled!
Yes but the iTunes subscription would essentially offer almost any movie released dating back almost 50 years, 40 million songs, and god knows how many tv shows. The iTunes Store has the amount that is greater than even 10 netfixes would have together. It's got all the shows almost every channel offers. But the only downside is, it's per series/episode payment, and not subscription. You may be paying for Netflix for $10, and may watch 5 episodes a day.. similar to me too... but you have got to admit that if Apple would give an iTunes subscription, it would offer its whole catalogue, and if it goes at the price of Netflix, I doubt the content owners would stay. Also, as I mentioned, it would be music, tv and movies. And unlike you, there would be people paying for so much. People have paid for the iTunes Match at $99 a year, they have paid for iCloud when it was $50 a year. They did buy and download albums and songs, and are still renting movies. All these stats.. well $99 per month would be a bit eggaration. But you get my point.. I can't see it being priced under $30.. with all 3 stores combined
Strange that a US based company would do that before rolling it out worldwide.
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Clever.Is that when the new iMacs are being debuted too?
Your implication with that comment is piracy as Kodi is merely a media player and offers NO CONTENT that could possibly do what you are implying it can supposedly do. I do not want to see Kodi development stopped because people are abusing it.
Bundling is not inherently bad, but rather it depends entirely on whom gets to do the bundling. If it's the consumer picking out 5-10 channels and getting a discount and getting a bigger discount for picking out 11-20 channels, etc., etc. then it would be a good thing. The problem is it's always the provider who gets to make these decisions and they always bundle things together that oppose each other (e.g. I might want CNN, but that doesn't mean I want a Catholic or shopping channel to come with it while Fox and MsNBC are in separate packages, forcing you to buy all three if you want all three news channels, etc.)
Thus cable providers could provide discounts for buying multiple channels (bundles), but the consumer should be the one picking those channels, not them. The whole idea of targeted advertising appeals to corporations yet when it comes to targeted marketing of a given TV channel, they suddenly think you should take whatever they want to give you rather than buy what you actually want to watch.
Eddie Cue is a complete and total loser, can't even get a deal done. Steve Jobs could get deals done. Eddie Cue needs to pull his head out of his ass, or maybe Tim Cook should hire more capable people. Cue is self-involved, pompous and arrogant.
Apple can't just make iTunes a subscription though. They have to negotiate the streaming rights for all the content because right now they just have the rights to sell/rent downloads. Even then the catalog will always be changing as the content owners keep switching distributors (Apple, Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, etc.,) based on who will give them the best deal. The only thing that doesn't hop on the distribution merry-go-round is original content which is why original content is so important.
Original content serves the same purpose for Netflix and Amazon that it does for CBS and AMC. It gets gets viewers to watch a particular channel/streaming service in order to see new episodes of content that can't be seen any place else (legally of course). Streaming services are the new tv/cable channels, and bundled streaming services are the new cable bundles. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
The customer gets a bundle from the provider who gets a bundle from the media companies that produce the content who make the bundle in the first place because it's more profitable and helps mitigate risk. The high profile channels bring in the big bucks when they are hot, but also lose big bucks when they are not, while the smaller channels generate lower, but more reliable, revenue streams.
In other words, they do what's best for them and not the customer, exactly what I said. Therefore, the customer will increasingly say "to hell with them" and drop cable entirely. For example, I will be canceling all my cable subscription and save over $700 a year even with buying the few shows I still watch. Let them mitigate THAT risk as more do the same every month. If you want it all, you eventually end up with nothing.
I have a friend who is on a water meter, however he gets billed for something like a flat $200 for the first 100 Cubic Meters per year, he and his wife use less than 1/2 of that. He recently found his water bill went up by 50%, but now he could use 200 cubic meters per year. Sure the cost per cubic meter went down, but the real effect was a 50% price increase.
Simply having MORE of something does not automatically means it more valuable.
Thing is, if the copyright laws stayed sane, a lot of early content would be available for everyone for free, free to Apple, Free to Netflix, Free to Amazon.
So, no I won't be ever willing to pay that price you suggest.
Every company does what's best for them. Even customer-friendly companies do so primarily because they believe that that will lead to more customers and more customer loyalty. My point is that as long as the companies that create the content sell their shows/channels in bundles to distributors then you can expect distributors to pass bundles onto the consumers. Distributors don't want to buy bundles anymore than end viewers want to buy bundles, but they also aren't going to take a revenue hit by not passing the bundle along.
Even though you are 'sticking it to the man' now, when the dust settles it'll basically be cable TV all over again (especially if the FCC continues in it's new anti-consumer direction). Cable/Sat providers are morphing into ISPs and individual channels and content creators are creating their own streaming apps to sell directly to viewers. The ISP/streaming distributor relationship will mirror the cable company/channel relationship.
A la carte will still be an option (like it's an option today and has been for nearly a decade) but dollars do donuts for most viewers a bundle will the be most economical choice even if they get some things they don't want. And then the bundles will get bigger, and have tiers and get more expensive, etc., and 30yrs from now the next generation will be complaining about 'streaming bundles' the same way we are complaining about cable bundles today.
That's a meaningless statement given companies are driven by consumers. If the consumers abandon the companies, they go out of business.
Other than raising the price of my Internet (in actuality it's going down for speed since my speed just doubled twice in the past two years and I'm getting 110Mbps down now and 21Mbps up for $58 a month not counting package discounts for "triple play") what are they going to do to me? I'm talking about buying Blu-Rays or iTunes TV Shows series instead of paying for shows I DON'T watch. There's plenty of free news out there. I like to watch live TV sometimes, but there's always the antenna. $1200 a year for the cable is a LOT if you really don't watch most of it and I'm typically not even available for 1-2 months a year on top of that (trips, vacations, other things going on, etc., but you have to keep paying or they charge to set up and r remove the equipment, etc. It's a rip-off.
They dont roll it out worldwide afterwards. There is now portions of iOS which are strictly limited to US
It's their failed backup plan. Eddy needs to go.
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That's what I'm saying.
I didnt know that Apple does offer those subscriptions. I was planning to subscribe to HBO because they have most of my fav TV series but I needed to get a TV subscription so I tossed that idea out. Now it might seems like something I would get...
One of my favorite... Real Time with Bill Maher. I'm sure if I sat down I'd find others. But I used to have South Park season pass, and I'd have to wait sometimes until Friday to watch it. Because I paid for it, I didn't mind watching a free stream just "minutes" after it aired.
Wow, this is timely. Mrs. EDJ and I were just talking about finding a way out of our phenomenal cable bill. We have Gen III Apple TV, but now the world is full of Firesticks, Sling Boxes, Roxios and a bunch of other newer services. The vast array is confusing.
Anyone got a clear synopsis?
Anyone got a clear synopsis?
Well there's a huge difference between Netflix and iTunes. Netflix is a small collection that recycles. iTunes is everything ever made. It justifies the cost.
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What makes you think they can't? They are nowhere close to being "well oiled streaming monsters". They are startups a few years into their little experiment. Streaming is barely in its infancy.
Kind of like paying for HBO and Starz but getting Showtime thrown in for nothing. Well that makes sense - you'd just be paying what they're worth.
I'm confused by your statement. Netflix is a startup? Netflix is nearly 20 years old, hardly a startup. Yes, they have transitioned the format they distribute content on as technology and consumer use changed. That's what successful companies do. They either transform or they become dinosaurs like Blockbuster.
I would also hardly call streaming in its infancy. In 2015 streaming rentals for the first time ever beat out DVD rentals and that trend continued in 2016 and no signal of reversal.
But I didn't say Apple could not get a streaming deal --- I said they couldn't get the deal the poster proposed which is to be able to stream everything Apple holds under license as an "all you can watch" program. Every movie and TV title has it's own agreement with the distributor. Some only allow PPV viewing, some grant Netflix or Amazon, etc. exclusivity to put in a subscription, etc. It's not as simple an agreement as people think.
And if companies don't do what's financially in their best interests they go out of business. The symbiotic relationship between company and customer, coupled with market competition, is what's supposed to keep company's honest, but when a monopoly takes hold (even if it's just at the local/regional level) and/or companies collude with each other then customers can be left out in the cold. That's how Comcast is able to be the biggest cable and broadband ISP provider in America while also being the most hated company in America.
I'm not saying it's not a rip off or that you shouldn't save money where you can. I'm just saying to expect streaming to evolve into Cable 2.0 as opposed to a consumer-centric utopia that some people are envisioning. Incumbent ISPs will continue to use things like zero rating, data caps and throttling to keep the ball in their court even though data is pretty much a limitless resource. Internet usage is only going to go up, not down, and that means the leverage in the waiting game goes to ISPs, not consumers.
Startup in the sense that streaming is new. Netflix did DVDs before and still do if I'm not mistaken.
Rights negotiations are incredibly tough. But if they did iTunes for music, they can eventually do TV shows and movies. From what I understand, they haven't made progress because distributors are uneasy about streaming. So they would need to wait until the industry fully shifts away from bundled cable.
I understand their negotiations were for streaming TV bundles, but since they abandoned that, streaming iTunes is what they should target when studios come back to the table.
Yes, but that's like comparing the first automobile franchise near the turn of the 20th with a marquee brand dealership today. Jobs negotionations with the music companies was done at a time when the industry was bleeding from illegal downloads. The music industrial literally had nothing to lose and it was also limited to Mac users which was a tiny user base compared to the PC user base.
Now what happened was that iTunes revived the music industry and with that iTunes was able to start calling shots -- like keeping prices at .99/song when the industry wanted to go higher. Eventualy Apple traded removing DRM with increasing song prices to $1.29
With video Apple isn't reall innovating its just searching for a me-too bundle. It doesn't have the leverage that it did when Jobs negotiated the iTunes store. Content is king now because distributors are a dime a dozen, a nickle on Tuesday. Apple hasn't made progress because Apple thinks it still has leverage and no one likes a bully. Other companies have had no problem negotiating streaming bundles either for live TV or movies and back catalog TV. It's just Apple that can't come to deal.
To add to this, a middle man like Apple is no longer required. HBO, Showtime, CBS, WWE, UFC, MLB, NHL, etc., all have their own streaming apps/services that carry their content directly to the end customer.
The landscape is totally different than 15yrs ago and the movie/tv industry has a totally different business model than the music industry.
Thanks for the reply. Wow, you got a great deal. I have Comcast business class internet at home (I own a small business). I cut the cable for TV about 3-4 years ago but if I had been given the option of local channels for $3 I would have jumped on it. I am going to have to check and see if that is being offered in my areaWhen we were looking to pare down our ridiculously high cable bill 2-3 years ago, we initially were going to cut the cord - but we ended up going with a plan called "Internet Plus" instead. Comcast had it priced so that for $3 more than we'd pay for internet service, we get internet plus all the local channels.
Plus, for some reason, HBO.
I don't know that I'd be willing to pay a whole lot for HBO - we've never subscribed to it before - but $3/month isn't bad.