Shockingly, an Apple television may require television service
Canada’s Globe and Mail has a story that’s been getting a bit of buzz, as it relates to the television the world is (somewhat inexplicably) waiting for Apple to produce:
Rogers Communications and BCE [Bell] are in talks with Apple to become Canadian launch partners for its much-hyped Apple iTV, a product that has the potential to revolutionize TV viewing by turning conventional televisions into gigantic iPads.
So, two immediate thoughts:
- Notice that the “much-hyped Apple iTV” hasn’t been mentioned once, ever, by Apple? Not only is the name “iTV” speculation, the entire product is speculation. The Globe has a “source” that says “Rogers and Bell already have the product in their labs,” which may indeed be true—but again, this is speculation. And there’s nothing that suggests that the product, if it exists, isn’t an update to the existing Apple TV.
- What the hell does “gigantic iPad” mean? Seriously, stop it.
Paul Graham may want to kill Hollywood by funding “startups that will compete with movies and TV” because he believes “Hollywood is dying,” but his belief is wrong—what’s against the wall is the modern incarnation of the studio system. By and large, we still want “Parks and Recreation” and “Game of Thrones”; the sticking point is getting them. It’s not the production system that needs to be disrupted. It’s the distribution system.
The original model of selling shows to networks which distribute through local affiliates that play the shows at appointed times survived unchanged for decades, and cable-only channels only cut out the affiliates. From the perspective of the networks, the rise of the TiVo and the DVR didn’t appreciably change that, but from the perspective of DVR users it changed everything. Once you start watching shows on your own schedule, it’s just about impossible to go back. And thank to streaming services and iTunes, we all understand full well that the Internet breaks the remaining chain to the networks entirely: we can subscribe to shows and get new episodes as they’re released, whether it’s through an a la carte system like iTunes or a flat rate system like Hulu Plus or Netflix.
That system has a lot of holes in it right now, though. Most current shows aren’t available on streaming services—or if they are, they have strange, arbitrary limitations—and while many more of them are available on iTunes, even there it’s far from complete, and we have a tendency to balk at the up-front cost of buying a dozen Season Passes for shows that we like.1 Our computers or appliances like the (current) Apple TV should be kick-ass replacements for set top boxes, but they’re not. There are many reasons why, but very few of those reasons are technological.
Yet those non-technological reasons are the ones that need solving. If Apple offered an “iTV” that you had to plug a cable box into, what’s the point? If the cable box still provides the user interface, nothing changes. If the deal Apple is working out boils down to Apple providing a great user experience for a set top box that otherwise works just like all the other ones, well—that changes some things, but only incrementally. Maybe incremental change is better than no change.
The assumption has generally been—and I think this is correct—that Apple would prefer to cut the cable companies out of the distribution model entirely. They’d be happy cutting everybody out of the distribution model entirely, and having studios just sell directly to them. But just like Apple realized they needed to work with carriers rather than compete with them, for the foreseeable future, they may be better off working with cable companies rather than against them. Talking about the iTV is still talking about unicorn-chasing, but at least if we’re talking about the distribution model rather than how wonderful it would be to say “Siri, record ‘The Jersey Shore’ for me,” we’re talking about the right unicorn.
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Of course, if you bought 12 season passes at an average of $40 a show, that’s still half of an $80/month cable bill. ↩
