I'm likely to be completely wrong, but I seriously think that Apple is prepping Apple TV for the iTunes cloud that we continue to hear about. It will be the premiere device for them if they want to enter that market. Imagine on demand streaming of all the shows you want for around $30/month. Ready to stream to your iPad, iPhone, iMac, and Apple TV.
"Imagine on demand streaming of all the shows you want for around $30/month"
Never going to happen. They'll do ala-carte pricing for on-demand content but no major network would go for a fee this low. I shouldn't really say never, it could happen but it would be very near or even above what you pay for cable now.
Realize that a large portion of your cable bill already goes to the networks - and the networks get a large chunk of chedder in ads. There's no way $30 a month for "all shows" could come anywhere near making up for the money a network makes with cable. For Apple to offer this service it would cost you more then you already pay for cable.
Realize too that the large cable systems are actually looking at providing this service with an initiative called TV Everywhere.
Between Netflix and Hulu, I get a lot (not all) of shows (and movies) streamed to me for ~$11 month (my netflix) + ads (hulu). For $30 dollars a month, I would expect access to a much higher percentage of old shows, plus streaming of the new ones.
Now, of course that doesn't mean the networks like it, or will agree to a contract like that. They should though, because they'll never get more than that out of me per month, and I see cable becoming increasingly irrelevant as streaming becomes more popular.
If you're not a power watcher you can make this work at that price point.
But as pointed out elsewhere Hulu is a trial service and still working out their model. It has quite a few shows but its totality is actually quite small. They're controlled by the networks and if you follow their TOS you should only be able to watch their shows on a pc NOT on a TV.
Netflix's service is awesome but again quite limited.
Sports is completely ignored in your model. ESPN makes $2-3 per cable subscriber whether you watch them or not. This equals about 1 billion (no joke) a year in revenues for them. So just to get ESPN it would cost about ~%10 of your viewing budget. Now its not just ESPN every network thats older than 5 years old gets a cut of your cable bill. Let alone the fact that you can't stream most local sports over the internet at this point.
I see both sides of the argument and I thought as you do that cable is becoming more irrelevant. Heck on Monday the UFC's Roku channel launched - which allows users to bypass cable for PPV events. My company built that. But the truth is that the TV Networks are pretty inextricably tied at this point to the cable operators. Internet delivery of on-demand content at a reasonable rate doesn't yet make sense.
"Between Netflix and Hulu, I get a lot (not all) of shows (and movies) streamed to me for ~$11 month (my netflix) + ads (hulu)."
You left off "...for now." Hulu is on record that they'll be moving to a PPV model for certain shows. The days of completely ad-supported Hulu are numbered.
Heh, will it play Hulu running on that ugly Flash? Will it do Youtube streaming?
I bought the AppleTv on day 1 and use it a lot, but I will never pay Apple to see content that is free on the internet. Why would I pay iTunes when I can see The Daily Show at thedailyshow.com?
Lame. Until apple allows a fully functional browser on the AppleTv, they are dead.
I'd love to see it (sort of), but Apple has pretty a pretty piss-poor record of doing well anything in "the cloud". If anyone could get it right, it's google.
That's what Apple tends to do, though.. They wait and wait until a market already exists, and then they redefine it. Maybe they're bidding their time for cloud services?
Well then Microsoft must be kicking serious ass in the space too because they have spent a lot more.
I am super skeptical of any company that spends a lot of money to break into an area that isn't in their 'core competency'. Apple has shown they only know how to offer online services for a high subscription rate. It'd be interesting to see if they can offer anything decent for free or a low price point.
