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Apple Edging Further Into the Living Room by Cooperating with TV Content Providers

This is a good strategy. Control the delivery UI while giving cable companies' a strategy to save themselves allows Apple to get into the living room with little obstruction. Once there, they can sell you iTunes content (just watched Breaking Bad? How about buying the entire season on iTunes? Oh look, there's all this other content on iTunes too. AppleTV becomes your TV's home screen.

With more and more cable dependent content providers joining in, other independent ones will as well. Some will charge via their app, others will use the ad financed model. This mix of models is going to benefit Apple as a critical mass will at one point be achieved and it'll become the App Store Gold Rush all over again. I think it's a brilliant strategy.

Cable companies are and always have been the major obstacle in making the Apple TV a success so they have to be brought on side. Apple, like Google, Microsoft and Sony knows that being in the living room is critical for the success of iOS. Whoever gets there first in a big way is going to get ahead of the others. We're finally seeing the strategy that Steve Jobs was alluding to being delivered.
 
AdonisSMU said:
Id rather apple sponsor some smaller content providers first. The big boys will jump on board once they see the smaller players doing well and raking in the dough. I don't feel like they adequately went after the content providers directly instead they are allowing themselves to be bullied around by useless middle men who charge a premium for no good reason.
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3 things:
  1. Apple would become the new or added middleman. Pushing "them" out would just let another in.
  2. Apple would then be charging a premium for mostly the same "no good reason"
  3. the middlemen generally own the pipes on which ANY solution from Apple would entirely depend. Apple can't bypass them regardless of what they could accomplish with content creators.

Just as 5 variants of huge innovations of iPhone hardware doesn't yield huge "premium" savings from the wireless "middlemen", I don't know how we can expect the cable companies who own the broadband pipes to just roll over and let Apple take their TV subscription business... through their own pipes. Some of these cable companies are the very same "useless middle men who charge a premium for no good reason" as wireless players. Just as we're not getting huge discounts on wireless broadband service, we won't get huge discounts on wired broadband (or tv) service. The middlemen are entrenched either way- no way to get them out. If the toll for TV service is somehow reduced by some Apple TV innovation, the toll for broadband will rise to make up for it. Why not? Where you going to go?

If you are lucky enough to have a broadband provider competitor in your area, aren't they in the TV subscription business too? That would be like dropping AT&T 4G to switch to Verizon or Spint and expecting huge savings. Lot's of people have only one choice for broadband (not counting DSL which generally lacks the horses for streaming HD video in a reliable way). If broadband providers feel the big bite of falling cable revenues to a competitor service that completely depends on their pipes, they'll raise the broadband rate accordingly. How do we all not see that?
 
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Technarchy said:
I haven't had cable TV for about 3 years. The value of cable TV, especially premium cable, just isn't there.
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I've never had cable. But sometimes, it feels great to sit in front of a TV with no idea of what I want to watch, and just flipping through channels until something interesting is displayed before me. It's far more mindless than sleuthing out streaming content and waiting for it to buffer. I think it'll be decades before we have that same ease of use with internet based content.

On the other hand, I'll gladly trade the ability to channel surf for the ability to watch exactly what i want when i want to, as is with streaming content.
 
newdeal said:
Oh just setup a napster like way to steal TV shows without ads and make it so they can't trace it to Apple and then when the TV companies are desperate Apple will be there to "help" them out of the problem
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It took a 'Napster' for the music distribution giants to see the light, that the way people buy and listen to music, had radically changed. Only after being close to decimated, were they willing to sit down in earnest and embrace the new reality.

What it will probably take, is a way for people to get their tv/movie/video content in a different manner, before the content distributors will finally grasp, that their industry too is changing, and that they have to adapt or become irrelevant.

What that way might be, only the future knows.

basesloaded190 said:
I dont' want to pay for cable anymore. When I can watch the shows I want to watch without having to pay extra for the channels I don't, then you will have my interest.
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Tiger8 said:
Just curious, How much will you be willing to pay for the shows that you want to watch?
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As basesloaded190 noted, it's not about the money; content is not free, we all realize that. It's about being able to choose what we want to watch and pay for, and what we wish to decline, rather than have a couple of hundred channels shoved down our throat (and pay for those), whether we want them or not. Time is precious for most of us, and most people are selective about what they want to watch.
 
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Jsameds said:
I would love something like Netflix Plus (for want of a better name), for say £30-35/mo (compared to Netflix's £6/mo) but it has all the latest movies at the same time as BD/DVD release date, and all TV shows added on the same day they air on TV.

I would pay that in a heartbeat.
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It is called Hulu (for TV anyways). As for movies, it isn't going to happen. Studios will NEVER allow for cannibalism of their DVD/BD sales.
 
basesloaded190 said:
but Comcast suckered my into paying $10 more a month to double my internet speed to 50Mbs and get the very basic cable channels.
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Suckered? If you went for it then it's on you.

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newdeal said:
uh not really I mean a third party app that allows people to steal programs not to pay for them. That way profits will go down for the people who control the content and they will be more willing to allow apple into the walled garden
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You could rob liquor stores to pay for the programs, it's pretty much the same thing......unless you shoot someone of course.
 
mcfmullen said:
It is called Hulu (for TV anyways). As for movies, it isn't going to happen. Studios will NEVER allow for cannibalism of their DVD/BD sales.
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My rational thinking part of my brain is telling me you're right, but then the forward thinking part is telling me that it it could happen, because it already has happened to the music industry with iTMS when they allowed you to purchase a single track from an album as opposed to the whole album, potentially cannibalising album sales. Trust me, that was the last thing the record labels wanted, but hey, it worked. Not only did it work, it actually saved the industry from itself.

It will happen eventually, it's inevitable. They have to change with the times.
 
Well I'd LOVE to just get a package of channels I want to watch and be able to watch them on any device anywhere. But that is happening no time soon. Time Warner Cable will "let" me watch all of 5 channels when I'm not on my wifi along with some demand content.

Apple interface to watch cable would be much better than TWC's. Would love to watch my DVRed programs with it as well. But my question is the interface going to be based on sign-in (like HBOGO, NBCOlympics, ESPN) or based on sign-in and network (like the TWC app). Would love the former. Going on a trip? Take your Apple TV with you and watch your cable/DVR from your vacation hotel/cabin/etc. But we will see. TWC tends to lag behind other carriers.
 
macUser2007 said:
. . . .Now it's probably to late for Apple to regain its lead, at least for the foreseeable future.
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What are you talking about? Apple TV IS in the lead.

"More than half of all streaming boxes sold are Apple TVs"
http://gigaom.com/2013/07/16/apple-tv-roku-sales-stats/

screen-shot-2013-07-14-at-7-03-17-pm.jpg
 
apple really knows how to get in a business, by cooperating with TV content providers they really are strengthening their lead.
 
Plutonius said:
I'm not sure why you say that. Just look through the forums for plexconnect and you will see lots of happy people posting that they are using plex on their atv3.
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Yes, it works, in 70% of the cases where you enter the trailers section.

That's not what is annoying though, your machine where you set up your "server", is constantly looking for the DNS lookup, sometimes freezing certain operations.

The best solution so far is the jailbroken one, with Plex installed on the Apple TV.

I'm sure the ones happy with it are the ones who haven't tested the jailbroken one.

For me, the TV3 "solution" is just as good as relying on a external iOS device for Airplay to a standard Apple TV (any version after 2). It's just not good as a media center.
 
dgalvan123 said:
What are you talking about? Apple TV IS in the lead.
...
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Uhm, let me quote the relevant part of my post:

Just like Apple did it with iOS: they sat on it for years and only made the changes to the OS they should have made years ago when Android pushed past them. Now it's probably to late for Apple to regain its lead, at least for the foreseeable future.
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Hope this helps....
 
software capture Itunes,netflix..............

I use A software called Audials one to capture and save streaming movies and videos from Hulu,iTunes,and Netflix online streaming library.
It's able to convert saved shows,musics and videos to any format I need for my devices, that has always proven useful for me.I paid only once around 47$ and forever.

http://audials.com/en/one/index.html
 
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