People actually pay $15 a month$180 a yearfor a single channel? I could never imagine liking TV that much.
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HBO and Apple in Talks for $15/Month Apple TV Streaming Service Launching in April
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How do consumers not have choice? If a show gets good ratings it typically sticks around. If a show gets bad ratings it gets cancelled. Unfortunately 'crappy' is 100% subjective and consumers ARE choosing things like Duck Dynasty, Storage Wars, and fake documentaries about Mermaids (the highest rated show in the history of Animal Planet) which is why more and more content like this keeps getting made. On the flip side, you can have a highly regarded TV show like The Wire that doesn't pull in big numbers so content like that is less likely to get made. The latest Transformers movie got an 18% on Rotten Tomatoes (53% audience score) yet it was the 5th highest grossing movie in the US in 2014 (and grossed over $1 billion world wide). The consumer has spoken and Transformers: Age of Extinction was a spectacular hit (at least in terms of revenue).
Napster resulted in iTMS which is a single store that dominated the market. How is a single store dominating the market giving the customer choice? It's only been with the rise of streaming services like Pandora and Spotify that the iTMS has had any legit competition. Unfortunately streaming music services, so far, are horrible for artists but that's a whole different thread.
For TV/movies we have Hulu, Netflix, Amazon streaming, iTunes, PSN, XboxLive, Epix, HBOGO/Now, Vudu, YouTube (the for-pay section), CBS Mobile... I'd say the TV/movie industry (which has a significantly more complicated and completely different business model than the music industry) is in a much better place than the music industry ever was. Is all the change going to happen over night? Of course not. The movie/TV industry as we know it today has roots going back over half a century and is a complex relationship between content creators (the people that make the content), content producers (the people that pay for the content to get made), advertisers and foreign & domestic content distributors (cable, sat, local TV stations, retail stores, streaming/VOD, etc.,.). Sometimes these are all separate entities, and sometimes they are not.
Internet streaming/VOD has only been around since 2007 and a lot has changed over the last 7 years.
They offer Plex functionality through iTunes?
also by that logic why would Apple offer Netflix, or Hulu, or other streaming stations?
but to answer your question,
because it is functionality people want, and having it keeps people on their device instead of a Roku or other device, so Apple at least keeps the customer on a device that has the Apple Store on it instead if only competitors.
HBO has something like 30 million subscribers and the average price to add HBO to your cable/sat package is about $15 (assuming no special deal or discount).
First you said the channels pay the cable co, now it's the other way around? The reality is, its more complicated than that, and your $15 certainly doesn't get divided on a nice even scale between the channels. It depends where the power is. Many if not all junk channels have to survive on ad revenue alone.
The money you're paying has nothing to do with those junk channels. Your $15 is the amount market research says you're willing to pay for one good channel and a couple of adequate ones (although you may not realise you're willing to pay that). The extra junk ones are just added in to muddy the waters, to stop you thinking about it in such stark terms. $15/mo is a lot for 1 channel, but the reality is, those are the kinds of sums that need to move around to keep a quality channel going, and those are the sums that people are paying to fund it whether they realise it or not.
The junk channels are irrelevant.
You fall into this trap, by underestimating how much you have been willing to pay for what you want. Almost everybody does, this is why I keep saying, a la carte pricing, when it comes, is going to be a shock.
Unless it's a premium channel like HBO or Showtime (or an extreme outlier like ESPN)ad revenue is where the big money is across the board. The subscriber fee paid to the channel by the cable/sat company isn't very much so of course there are still commercials. Expecting anything else is like paying for a newspaper or magazine and expecting it to be ad free.
Agreed. If you want new, original programming w/o ads you have HBO's price of $15/mo. If you want mostly old movies and old TV shows (with a tiny bit of original programing) you have Netflix at $9/mo. If you want new TV shows with ads you have CBS All Access or Hulu for $6/mo and $8/mo respectively.
What happens if you VPN to the site? I had a friend a few years back that did that to watch his local games and it worked fine.
Ya know, when I first heard about this I was all giddy since I've been a cord cutter for about ten years now. Hell, I started the movement! 
Anyway, when you think about it, there really isn't any reason to subscribe to this type of thing since you can simply wait until the show ends up available on disc or through a streaming service. If it never makes it to streaming then just rent the discs like we do or buy the entire set when it comes out.
Watching these popular shows live is great and all but not everyone gaurantee that they'll be able to plop down in front of the TV at the same time each night or whatever. Maybe they don't want to? What I'm saying is that there is plenty to watch while you wait for other shows to become available. Watching using discs is great because you can watch extra episodes when you want, skip bad ones, rewind, pause, etc, etc. and you can watch them anytime you want.
This is still good news since pay TV sucks on every level possible. But, paying for each channel via ala carte which is what we all hoped for isn't exactly the cats meow either as it turns out.
Anyway, when you think about it, there really isn't any reason to subscribe to this type of thing since you can simply wait until the show ends up available on disc or through a streaming service. If it never makes it to streaming then just rent the discs like we do or buy the entire set when it comes out.
Watching these popular shows live is great and all but not everyone gaurantee that they'll be able to plop down in front of the TV at the same time each night or whatever. Maybe they don't want to? What I'm saying is that there is plenty to watch while you wait for other shows to become available. Watching using discs is great because you can watch extra episodes when you want, skip bad ones, rewind, pause, etc, etc. and you can watch them anytime you want.
This is still good news since pay TV sucks on every level possible. But, paying for each channel via ala carte which is what we all hoped for isn't exactly the cats meow either as it turns out.
Same price as with the cord? There is a mistake being made. And someone will end up realizing the overpriced package at some point. Repeating most movies in a loop with some custom programing is not enough for many
I'm confused by how many folks think $15/month is a lot; don't any of you subscribe to cable via Comcast/Verizon?
HBO is a $10-12/month add on to the packages offered (generally $59.99 to $99.99 per month); with this arrangement, you don't need all the other stuff (that you may not even watch) just to get HBO content.
HBO is a $10-12/month add on to the packages offered (generally $59.99 to $99.99 per month); with this arrangement, you don't need all the other stuff (that you may not even watch) just to get HBO content.
I was addressing the issue with bundling and paying for unwanted channels.
So true! And I agree, crap is king and you agree with me by saying, it's unfortunate. My point was, I don't care about WHICH CHANNEL it is on.
I don't like to pay for bundles and channels I don't watch.
I want a-la-carte and pay an appropriate amount for that alone.
"We" ? You mean the US. MR is a global site and many other countries have fewer legal choices and usually pay higher prices for those.
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Let's not have the wealth debate. If it's affordable for you, great, subscribe!
For most others,
$15 IS a lot for one channel with constant repeats.
It's $180/year to watch the 2-3 shows the average person likes, or you could buy the DVD seasons at the end of the year for a lot less and repeat ad-nauseum without added cost.
Netflix is $96/year and has thousands of shows and movies.
Agreed. It's not a question of affordability, but value for money.
$15 add-on for classic HBO has always been poor value for money. People have paid it, however, because cable wouldn't be worth having without it. And since they're already on the hook for $50, $60 or whatever silly amount they're paying for 200 crap channels, $15 doesn't seem much more to pay.
It's still bad value for money however. Always has been.
For me I only need HBO, netflix, CBS, and internet. That cost me total ~$80. For internet and TV w/ HBO through my provider I pay $120. That's $480 in savings a year
First of all, no. I'm a human, just like everyone else.
Second, this isn't about me. It's about the fact that you openly admitted (even bragged about) stealing the work of others. Which by any objective definition makes you a thief.
I'm not the one with hundreds of servers uploading this stuff. Your problem is with them not me.
There is no "wealth debate". The poster you quoted was simply saying that HBO has always cost this much money. If you couldn't afford it before, you probably can't now. If you could afford it, you probably still can.
And whether you can afford it is entirely up to you.
HBO is sort of taking a pre-emptive step.
The FCC has done two things over the past 12 months that really work in Apple's favor to get their TV product off the ground.
1) The FCC floated and then adopted the MVPD definition. Once the whole process is finalized, This would basically remove the regulatory buffer that current broadcast & cabe companies had over programming. The change in definition would allow any company broadcasting multiple streams of programming to have access to the same programming, most of which is owned by the cable companies themselves, just like Satellite broadcasters have today. Thus, there will be a flood of new "broadcasters" via the internet. This would mean that Apple would have the right to obtain programing for all of the channels you enjoy on cable, local broadcast, etc. This would also mean regular HBO not just HBO go. This is an ongoing process at the FCC so not sure when things get finalized.
2) Net Neutrality. This ensures that all content will be transmitted from all sources to all customers the same. No fast lanes for certain vendors etc. Thus, the ISP, many of who are broadcasters or can be in the broadcasting business, can't extort $$$ from other internet "broadcasters" to ensure they have adequate bandwidth provided to their customers. Like #1, this was recently approved by the commission but still has to go through the remainder of the process as well.
The FCC has done two things over the past 12 months that really work in Apple's favor to get their TV product off the ground.
1) The FCC floated and then adopted the MVPD definition. Once the whole process is finalized, This would basically remove the regulatory buffer that current broadcast & cabe companies had over programming. The change in definition would allow any company broadcasting multiple streams of programming to have access to the same programming, most of which is owned by the cable companies themselves, just like Satellite broadcasters have today. Thus, there will be a flood of new "broadcasters" via the internet. This would mean that Apple would have the right to obtain programing for all of the channels you enjoy on cable, local broadcast, etc. This would also mean regular HBO not just HBO go. This is an ongoing process at the FCC so not sure when things get finalized.
2) Net Neutrality. This ensures that all content will be transmitted from all sources to all customers the same. No fast lanes for certain vendors etc. Thus, the ISP, many of who are broadcasters or can be in the broadcasting business, can't extort $$$ from other internet "broadcasters" to ensure they have adequate bandwidth provided to their customers. Like #1, this was recently approved by the commission but still has to go through the remainder of the process as well.