“Showtime, the premium cable network known for ‘Dexter’ and ‘Homeland,’ has made it past Apple’s gates, with its on-demand videos of full episodes now available on the company’s video-streaming box Apple TV,” Joan E. Solsman reports for CNET.
“The $99 Apple TV, which connects to televisions to stream video over the Internet, has been an afterthought in Apple’s device lineup,” Solsman reports. “More than two years have passed without a hardware refresh to a new generation, limiting Apple TV’s recent updates to the addition of new channels.”
Solsman reports, “Apple’s gated approach to channel selection for Apple TV has kept its library of channels low…”
Read more in the full article here.
no Dish authorization.
I don’t need a “library of channels”, but a handful of some more mainstream options would help a lot. If the major networks would sell subscriptions via Apple, I would dump cable entirely.
(I know, you think I could get an antenna to do just that. Sorry. I live too far from “civilization” for that.)
The Apple TV isn’t an “afterthought”, it just doesn’t require as many refreshes as other Apple devices. Most of the improvements have come on the software side.
Isn’t it about content anyways. The box doesn’t need to be fancy. It just needs lots of content which Apple is adding now pretty rapidly. It would be better if there was an all la cart type of TV service. Pay only for channels you want. If Apple could set that up, done!
I mean, if you have showtime or HBO, you probably already have Directv or something which has on demand. So Why, just why I ask must Apple TV have it? I can understand netflix, but why cable on demand?
Good question. I think there is a small minority of people who subscribe to cable and premiums but use cable card (such as in TIvo and some TV). If you get cable via cable card, I don’t think you are able to do on-demand programming.
Several reasons:
1) We have a large house with Xfinity X1. That allows us 4 boxes, but with Apple TV we can do most of the cable we watch on demand on remaining TVs.
2) It’s not limited to in-house. We can take the Apple TV with us and watch cable on demand as long as the location has good connectivity.
3) The Apple TV app interface is often better than others, certainly better than TiVo which we also use, but kinda sucks for on-demand.
All of this though is really more of an iOS initiative from the content providers. As such, it’s a backend that’s really where the work for them is, and then slight modifications for iPads and iPhones, for us as users, we make the connection of our mobile devices and then on the Apple TV which may rarely be used, but when it is, it’s nice to have.
This will be awesome when I can subscribe to Showtime Anytime, and HBOGo directly for the same price I pay for Netflix and Hulu. The content creators need to un-bundle themselves.
It will be awesome when I can subscribe to them directly without having to pay a cable company for them first. In the meantime there’s BitTorrent…
Well, another app that I have to hide on my AppleTV.