“Apple wants the TV guys to provide their shows for its proposed streaming video service,” Peter Kafka reports for Re/code. “But that’s not the only thing Apple wants from the TV guys: It wants them to provide the streams, too.”
“Streaming video costs aren’t prohibitive: Delivery to your living room runs an average of around five cents per hour per stream, says Tom Morgan, a video industry veteran now running streaming service Net2TV,” Kafka reports. “That said, outside of Netflix, which streams billions of hours of video every three months, most streaming services haven’t experienced significant demand to date. The notion of paying their own freight for a heavily promoted Apple service has given executives pause, sources say.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: If Apple doesn’t handle the streaming, perhaps they think they won’t have to pay the ISP interconnection fees in order to ensure the quality of the streaming. However, if the content providers fail to ensure streaming quality, consumers will still blame Apple, just as they blame Apple TV today when some ISP’s bandwidth magically gets choppy whenever Apple TV is in use. Hopefully, Apple is thinking ahead and realizes that, regardless of the culprit, it’s Apple who will get blamed if the content stutters, freezes, or otherwise fails to stream perfectly. We expect Apple understands this and has a plan.
“Delivery to your living room runs an average of around five cents per hour per stream…”
Wow, I actually think that is impressively low. I would have guessed more then that.
So, for $10 a month (not including programming cost, other overhead or profits, just hard streaming cost), that would get me 200 hours of streaming video, or a little over 6 hours a day. Interesting.
That’s wholesale, of course. A per stream per hour average, not a consumer price for streaming.
Is that high or low? Is that $0.05/stream(1 show)/hr/customer(1)? That would add up pretty fast.. And since that is cost to the supplier which needs to pay for a lot more than the streaming costs, it seems unlikely that most will be able to get out of the red..
Seems a bit shortsighted on Apple’s part. Thought they’d want to insure an “Apple” experience by controlling the end to end delivery.
Smart move.
Keeps the heat for the extensive streaming bandwidth distributed, as opposed to Apple’s exclusive burden to police and manage and makes the content providers share it too which keeps everyone interested in a smooth user experience…
If Apple is using distributed servers for the media sold via iTunes, why not keep the quality stable by hosting those shows on the same servers? At this rate it will depend on the provider to pay for the level of service they can afford and that QOS may be all over the board..
Are cable companies responsible for these things? What if Apple is trying not to be a cable company? FCC could be all over this.