Let's say I'm a TV executive for your average cable channel, like... Animal Planet. What's to stop a channel like Animal Planet from working directly with Apple to provide content, bypassing cable companies?
The contracts [Animal Planet] already has in place with the cable companies expressly forbidding a la carte or online distribution.
Simple solution. Apple has gobs and gobs of cash. So why don't they create their own cable network, call it Appleseed, and from there, air their own weather station, news station, Apple produced shows and movies. Therefore they won't have to get rights for all the content they create, because they already own the rights to it all.
Either that, or just buy Paramount Studios and the Fox Network, and go from there.
Simple solution. Apple has gobs and gobs of cash. So why don't they create their own cable network, call it Appleseed, and from there, air their own weather station, news station, Apple produced shows and movies. Therefore they won't have to get rights for all the content they create, because they already own the rights to it all.
Either that, or just buy Paramount Studios and the Fox Network, and go from there.
I don't understand - this year we were supposed to see the "greatest product lineup in Apple's history" but so far all we have seen are some pretty crummy laptop revisions. What's going on?
As others have posted, Apple can provide a great UI (and one that is, hopefully, much much better than the current Apple TV), but the cable providers are running a cartel so they don't need Apple's UI to make a ton of money. And every TV manufacturer as well as Google and Microsoft are in this space already to some degree.
Apple may as well.... outside cable companies are delaying things..
Perhaps Apple wants to make cable companies the "content rights aggregators." It would actually be a nice model:
-Buy cable internet/FiOS service from whoever services your area. $50/month.
-Buy Apple TV and television set.
-Subscribe to TV content from any of the traditional cable TV companies, but delivered over the internet through Apple TV.
This has several advantages, both for consumers and cable companies:
-Consumers get to choose which content aggregator to buy from. Maybe Time Warner owns the cable lines in your neighborhood, but Charter offers a better package of channels. You could buy content from Time Warner, AT&T, Verizon, Charter, Comcast, or any other cable company.
-Cable companies get the ability to sell content to consumers where they don't own any cable lines. They also get to avoid being relegated to "dumb pipes" by maintaining a content revenue stream.
They should just abandon the tv at this point