“Apple and HBO haven’t disclosed the terms of their partnership, which gives Apple a three-month digital exclusive for the streaming service,” Peter Kafka reports for Re/code. “But Apple’s existing deals with some video services give us a sense of what the company might be doing with HBO — and what the new economics of ‘over-the-top video’ could look like.”
“When any publisher, including a video service, signs up a subscriber via an Apple app on an iPhone or iPad, Apple takes a 30 percent cut of the monthly fee,” Kafka reports. “But Apple didn’t extend its 30 percent policy to developers on its Apple TV platform. While Apple and its partners have never talked about it publicly, my understanding is that a handful of video services, including Netflix, Hulu Plus and pro-baseball’s MLB.TV, give Apple 15 percent of their monthly fees for any subscriber who signs up on Apple TV.”
Kafka writes, “Whether Apple is charging 15 percent or 30 percent a month, it’s giving distributors a much better deal than the 50 percent that pay TV providers usually charge premium networks like HBO.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Reasonable pricing gives Apple a nice carrot to offer programmers as they build their “skinny” bundle(s) for their reportedly forthcoming Internet TV service.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]