Rivals leaving Apple behind as Apple TV remains stuck in a test pattern
“Since well before Steve Jobs died in 2011, Apple executives have been saying TV entertainment needed a wholesale reinvention and Apple was just the company to do it,” Shira Ovide reports for Bloomberg. “Fast forward to 2017, and America’s entertainment is being reinvented. But Apple is barely involved… Perhaps the most surprising thing is Apple doesn’t seem to have a vision for what it wants to do in entertainment even after all these years. This is emblematic of Apple’s waning ability to invent the future.”
“To see how far Apple hasn’t come, it helps to flash back to just after Tim Cook became CEO. He dropped hint after hint that the company was working on something big in television. ‘Many people would say this is an area in their life they’re not really pleased with … the whole TV experience,’ he said in a 2012 interview. ‘This is an area of intense interest for us,'” Ovide reports. “Five years later, Cook is still proclaiming great interest in shaking up entertainment, but he doesn’t have much to show for it. Here’s what Cook said last week when he was asked about Apple’s position in television and Apple’s recent debuts of TV-like web video programming. ‘We’ll see how this goes, but it is still an area of great interest,’ he said. His rhetoric is getting stale.”
“Eddy Cue, the Apple executive in charge of digital media, recently said Apple was trying to ‘do some different things’ in entertainment. But it hardly seems that way,” Ovide reports. “After 10 years, Apple TV is pretty much the same. Meanwhile Amazon, Google and others are leading the way in revamping how people interact with TV sets by speaking to them or mixing live television programs with libraries of older shows and movies.”
MacDailyNews Take: It’s plainly evident and very, very simple: The Apple executive in charge of digital media is the wrong guy for the job.
Tim Cook still seems to be unable to do what needed to be done years ago; affixing bandaids where excision is required.
Eddy CueEddy Cue. Can’t get the deals done. Can’t recognize blatantly bad TV from the pilot, much less at the pitch stage. Puts TV content into “Apple Music.” Needs Tim Cook to hire people who can actually do his job (first Jimmy Iovine, now Erlicht and Van Amburg). Inexplicably continues to get paid tens of millions per year. Boy, the photos Cue possesses must be doozies!
Apple’s so-called TV ‘strategy’ continues to be an embarrassing joke because it’s run by an embarrassing joke. — MacDailyNews, June 30, 2017
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It’s quite possible that without Steve Jobs’ help, Eddy Cue couldn’t get ink in a stationery store. — MacDailyNews, November 5, 2015
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We’re embarrassed for Apple, but, don’t forget what Tim Cook told us last fall, “And now, with the TV app, there’s really no reason to watch TV anywhere else.”
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! No, seriou… BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
