“Our Carlton Wilkinson wrote a nice piece last week about Apple’s [rumored] TV,” Dana Blankenhorn writes for TheStreet. “I can sum up his expectations for the product in one word: Meh. “But there’s reason to believe Apple’s chances of success are greater than you might think. That reason can also be summed up in one word: Sports. Almost half your monthly cable bill now goes to sports.”
Blankenhorn writes, “Accelerating bills for basic cable or satellite, driven by sports rights fees, create a bigger opportunity for those who can provide an unbundled alternative… That’s what iTunes can do. The infrastructure is already there. It has already done this with music. A compelling product, with a business model people already support, is something cable networks will have to take notice of, and that’s what Apple knows how to deliver.”
“Imagine a high-capacity DVR inside that screen, connected to the cloud for unlimited choice in programming, with your current iMac, iPhone or iPad used as the ‘clicker’ and WiFi as the glue connecting it all,” Blankenhorn writes. “Now imagine a business model that gives you any programming you want, when you want it, at a fraction of the cost of your existing cable bill.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Imagining does not mean reality. À la carte is a pipe dream. There are too many niche channels that ESPN, etc. support that would die. We’d basically end up with channels 2-13 again. (Okay, maybe channels 1-50, but you get the idea.)
If Eddy Cue can negotiate some sort of more limited “à la carte” deals – smaller, more tightly-focused groups of channels and networks*, that’d be amazing enough. So amazing, in fact, that his very next stop afterwards should be to the Middle East to broker a long and lasting peace. That’d be a piece of cake compared to wrangling pure a la carte out of
*For example, you get to choose from among categorized content blocks: “Food,” “Traditional Sports,” (maybe even “Soccer,” “Baseball,” “Basketball,” “American Football,” etc.), “Outdoor Sports,” Documentaries,” “News,” “Kids and Family,” “Lifestyle,” “Movies,” “Classic Movies,” etc.
Related article:
No, sports does not open the door for ‘Apple iTV’ – November 29, 2012