Every one of these threads are always the same. One crowd seeing Apple as some kind of savior who can step in, kick out the existing middlemen (cable companies), still give us everything "we" want to watch, somehow maintain the (profit) motivation for the creation of the new shows "we'll" want to watch in the future, etc, while getting a nice cut for Apple, yet cutting our monthly costs for television to a fraction of what we pay now.
A segment of these people want "commercial free" too, ignoring that it's the other people's money (running commercials on those 200 channels "we" never watch) that helps subsidize the "as is" model so that we get what we DO want to watch at the prices we pay now. But we want to kill those channels even though we never have to see one of those commercials (akin to wanting to kill the cell towers in all the places we never visit).
The math is always done wrong too: 200 channels / $100 (per month) = 50 cents per channel. I only watch 10 channels. 10 times 50 cents = $5. My bill should be $5 per month. Cut the cash flows to any business model by 90% or more and that model will significantly collapse. And Apple won't be nearly as interested in getting 30% of $5 (I think Apple wants 30% on top of the $100 "we" pay now). And just the OPM revenues from commercials mostly running on 200 channels "I" never watch works out to about $54/month per household.
Nevertheless, for all of this dream, we hang our hats on 2 things:
- Ignore the broadband rate as part of our money-saving calculations AND imagine that whatever we pay for broadband now will remain constant
- the owners of those broadband pipes on which an Apple replacement completely depends will just roll over and let Apple take their lucrative TV subscription revenues
Existing cord cutters are in the minority, meaning there is not enough pain from them yet for the broadband pipe owners to deal with that "problem." If the masses made that move, the Comcasts, etc would deal with the problem just like the cell phone bandwidth pipe owners dealt with it: ever-tightening tiers for "high bandwidth users". Why "we" pretend that won't happen, I just don't understand (as many of these companies are the SAME companies in wireless- same executives thinking of the same "innovations").
And if they do (tighten wired broadband tiers), where are you going to go? Isn't the other "competitor" in your area (if you are lucky enough to have more than one broadband provider) in the TV subscription business too? When AT&T "unlimited" cellular data was switched to "unlimited*" and then "tiered" could we switch to Verizon or Sprint for huge wireless bandwidth cost savings? We've all already seen this movie in just the last few years. This is the sequel and the story doesn't have a different ending.
As a few have pointed out, the ONLY way to drive some kind of major model change is Apple MUST show all of the other players- including those who own the broadband pipes through which Apple's replacement will flow- how they are going to make MORE- not less- money while cutting Apple in too. Since we're the source of "more" or "less" money, the replacement model will have to come by us paying "more" not less.
OR, if big cable is Satan, etc, then an Apple-relacement dream solution will require some kind of global reach innovation that would make it possible for us to be directly connected to iCloud without having to utilize the broadband pipes in place now owned by the Comcasts, etc of the world. A few have suggested Apple buys Verizon or Sprint but I doubt masses-level, on-demand HD video could be distributed over 4G bandwidth (if the masses made the switch). But even if it was possible, it seems Apple would carve that bandwidth out favoring iPhone (too) and this would still be a solution for only a portion of the world.
I think the solution down that path would be to buy DISH and repurpose it in this direction but even that is limited to North America. However, it would yield relatively quick, national reach. But even there, I just don't see it. To me this looks like a Star Trek "subspace" communications solution where the connection to iCloud would work from anywhere on earth or within many light-years. See a few rumors about a massive new source of (probably wireless) data bandwidth and then the dream might get some legs. Until then, I suggest hoping for the best in these deals with the devil… you know, just like the iPhone deal with AT&T.
