Apple Vowed to Revolutionize Television. An Inside Look at Why It Hasn’t – Bloomberg (Feb 16, 2017)
I think the shorter version of this story is that Apple hasn’t been able to revolutionize TV because the traditional TV industry isn’t willing to let it, at least not yet. More than in any other industry, the traditional players still hold pretty much all the cards when it comes to future services from a licensing and content perspective, and until that starts to break down, no outside player is going to make a meaningful difference. That means we’ll continue to have a mosaic of partial replacements for pay TV, mimicking some of the features and content but not others, and leaving users to pull it all together in custom bundles. Apple is part of that aggregation layer today, but doesn’t really play anywhere else – the Apple TV box and the TV app are partial solutions for the fragmentation problem, but are incomplete – you still can’t watch a full slate of traditional pay TV on your Apple TV, and the TV app excludes Netflix among other content providers. Both the box and the app are still useful, but they’re not revolutionary, and the intransigence of the old guard is the single biggest reason. In music, Apple was able to get the labels on board because they were panicking about Napster and file sharing, but the TV industry isn’t yet at that crisis point. In the next couple of years they’ll get there, but in the meantime Apple either has to continue to tinker around the edges or do something that looks less like a pay TV replacement and more like something different, a la Netflix.
via Bloomberg
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