Time Warner Cable in Talks with Apple on Streaming Video Deals

[steve62388]

ATV useless outside the US

I have had an ATV3 since December 2012 and have used it precisely never (except turning it on to see what it looked like).

Nobody outside the US cares about baseball and NFL, and the other services offered are only available in the US. The majority of Apple's market is outside the United States. The only useful app is Netflix and I already have that on my TV and blu-ray player and so end up using one of those for a stream. At the very least they desperately need Sky and Lovefilm in the UK. They should release an 'app store' for it.

I have been waiting for a jailbreak to make this hunk of plastic useful but now realise it's probably never going to happen.

I wouldn't recommend an ATV to anyone until they sort out the content.

 

[dugbug]

I'm glad Apple is catching up with Roku's concepts

Tivo's concepts are quite nice aren't they

----------

I have had an ATV3 since December 2012 and have used it precisely never (except turning it on to see what it looked like).

You don't use airplay? Thats like the killer feature. I have also found a lot of my dvds had a free "digital copy" coupon that activated an apple TV itunes stream.

Another useful thing about ATV is to buy itunes gift cards when they are on sale (very typical to get 20%.... there was one just last week, and staples has it going on now -- 9to5toys usually barks about them). gift card sales may be more common in the US though, not sure.

Anyway, with the 20% discount you can buy or rent using the itunes store at good rates. I got my kids the superman animated series, something not available on netflix, and IMHO overpriced without the 20%.

 

[FSUSem1noles]

:Yawn:

Still need to subscribe and PAY for service through Time Warner Cable..

 

[Gaspode67]

What about content production? The cable channels and networks typically pay to produce the original content they air. Someone self-funds a pilot episode, shops it around and if Network X likes it they'll basically pay production costs in exchange for distribution rights. At $2-3 million dollars an episode for a 1hr drama there aren't too many places that can front that kind of cash, not to mention consumers want simultaneous global distribution which effectively destroys the foreign and domestic sales model that allows the majority of content to become profitable.

Exactly! This is the thing that so many people forget when they start talking about "a la carte" models and how that will magically mean they pay a fraction of what they pay now for subscription TV (Cable or Satellite). The reason why you have so many extra channels that "nobody" watches is that these form a part of the revenue stream that funds (via the money paid for distribution rights to the production company) the making of the shows that you like. TV production costs a LOT of money. Do you really thing a show like, say, CSI is cheap to produce? Look how expensive HBO is on it's own. Now, take that cost, and apply it to every channel that you want a la carte, and that'll give you a more realistic idea of how much you'd be charged if you could truly pink'n'mix what you took.

The point about foreign sales is valid too. Here in the UK, some of the most popular TV series produced over the last few decades have only really been able to last as long as they have/did, because of the producers being able to sell the rights to other broadcasters in other countries. To name a couple, Inspector Morse (and its prequel Endeavour) and Downton Abbey have been successful and enjoyed long runs because of their ability to make money that could be ploughed back into development of other programmes. Incidently, all three of them are comissioned by ITV, the UK broadcaster. So, *that's* the real ITV. What all of you using the term lazily purely because you believe Apple has copyrighted the use of the letter "i" can do is, well, suffice to say it involves a long walk off a short pier!

 

[dugbug]

:Yawn:

Still need to subscribe and PAY for service through Time Warner Cable..

Depends.... you could conceivably remove the box and cable tuner and cable card fees. Prob a nice $6/mo or so. Not sure how this is going to manifest itself yet.

 

[alent1234]

Exactly! This is the thing that so many people forget when they start talking about "a la carte" models and how that will magically mean they pay a fraction of what they pay now for subscription TV (Cable or Satellite). The reason why you have so many extra channels that "nobody" watches is that these form a part of the revenue stream that funds (via the money paid for distribution rights to the production company) the making of the shows that you like. TV production costs a LOT of money. Do you really thing a show like, say, CSI is cheap to produce? Look how expensive HBO is on it's own. Now, take that cost, and apply it to every channel that you want a la carte, and that'll give you a more realistic idea of how much you'd be charged if you could truly pink'n'mix what you took.

The point about foreign sales is valid too. Here in the UK, some of the most popular TV series produced over the last few decades have only really been able to last as long as they have/did, because of the producers being able to sell the rights to other broadcasters in other countries. To name a couple, Inspector Morse (and its prequel Endeavour) and Downton Abbey have been successful and enjoyed long runs because of their ability to make money that could be ploughed back into development of other programmes. Incidently, all three of them are comissioned by ITV, the UK broadcaster. So, *that's* the real ITV. What all of you using the term lazily purely because you believe Apple has copyrighted the use of the letter "i" can do is, well, suffice to say it involves a long walk off a short pier!

the problem with an unpopular show is that it gets put into a crappy time slot and will never be watched and then killed. but with an on-demand model it will always be watched by the fan base. some of the more popular shows on netflix were network TV bombs

 

[steve62388]

You don't use airplay? Thats like the killer feature. I have also found a lot of my dvds had a free "digital copy" coupon that activated an apple TV itunes stream.

Another useful thing about ATV is to buy itunes gift cards when they are on sale (very typical to get 20%.... there was one just last week, and staples has it going on now -- 9to5toys usually barks about them). gift card sales may be more common in the US though, not sure.

Anyway, with the 20% discount you can buy or rent using the itunes store at good rates. I got my kids the superman animated series, something not available on netflix, and IMHO overpriced without the 20%.

Airplay is a reasonable feature, but not one worth £99 (on the basis I consider all the other features in the UK pretty much useless). For the extremely rare times I need to mirror my Macbook to my TV a HDMI cable would be fine.

I have a NAS so I can stream video from there if need be, although it can't transcode. But then neither can an ATV, a Mac Mini is what you really need for a decent media centre (but a Jailbroken ATV can do in a pinch).

The whole ultra violet thing is the movie industry getting it completely wrong again, and they wonder why piracy is so big. You have to register a UV account and then another account for every movie producer, and then every company has a different app, a different policy on how long it is valid for, how many copies you can have etc. The copies are virtually never from iTunes so useless for ATV. Who wants to manage all that?

I have never seen iTunes gift cards on sale in the UK, that's not to say they never are just that I'm not aware.