Cable & Content Companies Can't Be Disrupted by Apple

CNBC ^ | Thursday, 16 Aug 2012 | 11:13 AM ET | By: Julia Boorstin

[HamiltonJay]

Abuility to potentially dl and run apps on the device is interesting, but again, still not really a game changer, 5 years into its run and its outdone basically by $50 or less ROKU players.

Maybe Apple has some magic up their sleeve, but so far this device is just a red haired step child. I’m sure it was created originally at a time when Apple thought getting into streaming wasn’t a bad long term play, but its execution is beyond lackluster. I’m sure they tought they could do to the video world what they did with the music world, and it just hasn’t played out that way, and likely won’t play out that way.

Audio wise no one would avoid ITUNES if trying to distribute tunage, video, being on iTunes is just one of dozens of distribution options and not a huge one in terms of revenue for you either.

I think this thing started out with visions of being the video version of the iPod, but Apple underestimated greatly the video distribution world, both froma production and consumption side. Its okay, Apple can make mistakes, they aren’t Gods, no matter what their PR and rabbid fans may think.

Apple TV is as you admit behind ROKU 5 years into its existance. When even the company that makes the thing calls it a “Hobby” repeadly its not really a product with a purpose. I think the thing sells on the back of its brand over anything else, which is fine, but I really don’t see or get this thing.

Maybe someday It’ll have a distinct reason to exist, other than to sell folks who love Apple an overpriced ROKU player, or something their game systems and BLUE RAY players usually do out of the box, but for now, its really just fanboy toy with no real distinct market justification.

[kevkrom]

outdone basically by $50 or less ROKU players

The list price on the lowest Roku player capable of 1080p is $79.99, not less than $50.

And I'm certainly not going to knock Roku... as I mentioned earlier, it's still in the running for when I ditch cable/satellite (but that's over a year away still, sadly, due to contract commitments). But where it out-does the ATV is primarily in the number of "channels" offered, the major of I have no interest in (Amazon instant video would probably be the biggest exception, as a potential replacement for Netflix for me).

The real selling point for me would be if either (or both) system offered access to the live events I'd want to see (such as the existing NBA, MLB, and NHL packages).

[Hodar]

Apple disrupt the mobile telephone market? C’mon ... what does Apple know about building a decent cell phone? I mean, companies like Motorola, Nokia and LG got the hang of things ... it will take Apple decades for them to catch up with the dependability and reliability of the rest of the market .... or, so was the word of the day when Apple came out with the iPhone.

Now, these same “genius’s” are proclaiming that Apple can’t compete in the TV market.

My money is on Apple.

[HamiltonJay]

I have no problem with a dedicated device, there are certainly instances when one makes sense. Not everyone is tech savvy, and for secondary tv’s a $40 or $50 device to watch netflix is fine..

I just don’t get this particular Apple play, apple has a nice interface, but its overall product is nothing remarkable, and everyone knows apple would love to control TV like it does audio and the smartphone market.. so I can see why they started playing with this thing 5 years ago... However I just don’t see this playing out the way Apple I am sure would want it to. There is just nothing distinctive about this product that could remotely shift folks or cable operators en masse to adopt this and make it a draw in and of itself. IE, I’m going to drop comcast and go to fios because fios offers me an APPLE TV BOX and comcast doesn’t... like what happened with iPhone and the iPod...

I just don’t see this happening in this space. I see this as a commodity item and I just don’t see what Apple can do to it that’s going to make it more than that, of course I am sure they are trying their best to do it, but I just don’t see it.

Speaking of big screens and computers, I can still to this day remember a friend of mine who had is TI 994A tied to a huge projection screen TV back in the day :)

[HamiltonJay]

The Roku Player for < 50 is only 720p not 1080p, so its $50 less, but it comes with far more content and works just fine. If you want the 1080p its $20 cheaper. The point being its CHEAPER, its a COMMODITY ITEM.

Apple has the apple interface, but that’s it, its got fewer channels, and doesn’t really do anything remarkable or more than products out there. I just don’t see this being more than a fanboy toy, I really don’t. For the same $100 you pay for the ATV, you get a roku player just as powerful, and with an motion control sensor and games preloaded. etc etc..

I just don’t see how apple becomes the “IT” product in this space, I’m sure it would love for a cable carrier to brand its boxes etc.. but I just don’t see it. Are you really going to ditch your cable carrier for another because that one has the APPLE TV and yours has some other brand? Not hardly.

Apple’s making money on this thing, some anyway, and selling a few, but its not in anyway 5 years after launch a game changer.. and doubt it will ever be. Face it, Apple itself calls this a HOBBY... so that doesn’t bode well for this product itself to be much more than what it currently is.

Now that doesn’t mean Apple won’t take lessons from this and eventually introduce something that is a game changer in this space, but ATV as it stands sure as hell ain’t it, or likely to ever be it.

Apple MOVED the market in music and cell phones, it moved it out of the gate, ATV is just another product with an apple logo on it, it is not and likely never will be a market mover.

[kevkrom]

*shrug*

We’ll see. While the ATV still holds on to “hobby” status, a lot of the rumor mill suggests that this year (or early next year) will be the real push into the living room via some form of TV-based system. If that does happen, we’ll see what tricks Apple has up its sleeve then.

[itsahoot]

I use an EyeTV to record and edit programs that I like, and I can tell you that the standard 1 hour show is only 41 minutes and 30 seconds +-15 seconds.

There are usually some pretty good shows come on and then they get bold after they have an audience and begin to insert the porn both gay and straight, I can edit those scenes out and make them watchable, because they rarely add anything to the storyline.

[itsahoot]

Much easier to just plug a Mac mini into the big screen, then do it all. Since they went all digital, you have to have a box of some kind to catch cable content, so I have one box attached to my EyeTV, thinking maybe I need to look into a TiVo. That makes editing a two step proposition, but really it is nearly impossible to find anything that does not need editing for content.

I really miss this guy.

[itsahoot]

but at present its just a fan boy device.

I suppose I qualify as an Apple Fan Boy, but you are exactly right, it offers nothing that is not available on a ROKU, I have both of them. I currently have a Mac mini attached to my big screen, but I need a little more horse power, so I am going to put a 21 inch iMac quad core in its place, just run it dark behind the TV, thinking about unplugging the LCD in the iMac to save energy.

[af_vet_rr]

The media giants and distribution companies say it’s not just in their best interest — it’s also in customers best interest — to maintain bundles. By paying for channels they don’t watch customers are subsidizing the smaller channels that not everyone would select. Disney CEO Bob Iger has explained to me, if everyone only paid for the 10 channels they thought they wanted, smaller channels wouldn’t have the financial support survive, and no one would get all the channels they wanted. Both Iger and Time Warner [TWX 42.60 -0.09 (-0.21%) ] CEO Jeff Bewkes have stressed to me that customers really want the choice of dozens or hundreds of channels and don’t realize just how narrow choices would become without bundles supporting the system.

I call B.S. on this one. If a cable channel cannot pay for itself, let it die or move to YouTube.

I'm sick and dadgummed tired of the cable TV companies trying to claim that it's in our best interest to give them money for things we don't want.

Really disappointed in Apple, was hoping they'd finally force the companies to offer actual choice and not some crappy tiered system that wants to bump up our monthly bill by %20 or more just for a few channels we want and a bunch of channels we don't want.

We have found in many cases, that it is cheaper for us to ignore some of those bundles and just wait for the DVDs to show up on Netflix or Amazon, or even on the instant streaming.

We were spending over $1000 a year on TV channels/bundles. That $1,000 will easily cover Netflix, Hulu+, Amazon's Prime, a boatload of DVDs and even Blu-Rays and still leave us a few hundred bucks left over. And we get to skip the commercials to boot.

[Chipper]

AirPlay. I downloaded an album to my phone, AirPlay through my receiver to listen to it without tying my phone up to a wire plugged in to the receiver. One great advantage I have found for it, and I just got a Smart TV, smart BD, and have a WDTV Live Hub.

[Chipper]

MLB at Bat package looks amazing through the ATV. I do believe the NBA is on there and I know NHL is. I imagine it is only a matter of time before the Amazon Prime app moves from iPad only to ATV?

[antiRepublicrat]

You can get NETFLIX right in your TV, or your Blue Ray Player, or a Roku box for 1/2 the cost

Don't want it in a TV (and it's not in any of mine), not so easy to replace or repair the mechanism. PS3 will do it, and it's exactly that I replaced. I don't need a howling PS3 sucking up 100W of power to watch movies. Besides, the Netflix UI on the ATV is better. The PS3 also performed poorly when streaming from the computer, and the XBox didn't do much better. The ATV hasn't had a glitch yet, where the PS3 and XBox would pause and stutter at various times. As far as Roku goes, the 1080P products start lower than the ATV, but not half the price. Usual Apple-hating exaggeration.

I’m sure they make money off it, because parts inside it maybe add up to 20-30 bucks,

As far as the Roku is concerned, plug a $10 USB WiFi dongle into a $25 Raspberry Pi computer and you essentially have the hardware of an $80 Roku (same last-generation ARM chipset), plus Ethernet, but minus a bunch of other connectors of the Pi. And that's me adding up the retail prices, not how much it costs Roku to make them.

In contrast, the Apple TV is a much more powerful system, with a single-core version of the iPhone 4S chip: 800 MHz A5, dual-core GPU and modern ARM architecture (twice the performance per clock of the decade-old ARM11 system in the Roku). When the last generation Apple TV came out (A4 processor), it was estimated to cost Apple $64 to make. You know Roku's parts can't cost them more than $20 if we can get the same thing retail for $35. So who is making too much profit?

5+ years after its introduction it really offers nothing that isn’t a commodity and available in dozens of other places other than the itunes integration.

iTunes and iDevice integration were a selling point for me. Touch a button on the iPhone or iPad in almost any app that deals with audio or video, and it's on your ATV. Setup took all of a few seconds. I finally got to organize my movies and TV shows in iTunes to stream to the TV instead of just having them in folders. True, the ATV isn't groundbreaking, but it is a competitive product.

[antiRepublicrat]

AirPlay is just Apple’s version of DLNA

The major difference I've seen so far being that AirPlay actually works. Seriously, I tried DLNA to the PS3 and to other computers, and on the rare occasion that the products that said they were DLNA compatible actually produced video, they were often choppy. Same hardware and network all around, replace the PS3 with an ATV, use iTunes, and it all worked perfectly from the first moment, not even a stutter. After my previous experience with various DLNA clients and servers, I was very impressed.

but that’s the Apple way, take something already out there, give it a cooler name and a sexier UI

True, true, and true. But add two: making it work seamlessly, and charging more. Like I always say, Apple is rarely the first to do something, but Apple is often the first to do it *right*.

[antiRepublicrat]

Drawing only 2W and producing no noise while streaming a 1080P movie is a pretty good selling point of these devices vs. a full computer. Apple actually tried your way, since the original Apple TV was just a variant of a Mac Mini. It sold better when they went to mobile device specs and $100.

I have a different vision I’m moving towards: All the media on a server, sitting where nobody sees it. Stream from there to all the devices, including the computers, iPad and even the phones. I’m thinking 4x2 TB in a RAID5, giving me 6 TB storage. It needs a basic case and yard sale grade video card and LCD monitor, but a good mobo with SATA RAID HDD controller and a pretty powerful CPU to re-encode on the fly for low-bandwidth mobile clients.

[Mad Dawgg]

"Drawing only 2W and producing no noise while streaming a 1080P movie is a pretty good selling point of these devices vs. a full computer."

Sorry but a proprietary box that does one thing and doesn't allow me to store media the way I wish is no selling point for me. I use my settop computer for everything and it does it all very well and it gives me options that Apple won't allow. I can create and edit video, photos and music. I can play games including the latest MMORPGs. I can watch Television via a inexpensive card AND record the programs In 1080p with Dolby Digital sound and store them on my hard drive. I can even watch blu-ray and if I want rip the disc to my hard drive so I don't even need to mess with loading a disc. (Or i can use the digital copy that is provided with many discs now but they still feel the need to put DRM on the damn things to make inconvenient to back up the data etc.)

These single purpose boxes are just an attempt by "Big Media" to hang on to their failing business model. (Reselling the same media over and over in new unneeded formats.) In a few years they will have a new and improved format which will require a new box and all your old media won't work on it. Not gonna play their game.

[discostu]

For a lot of things the reason Apple does it right is because they own the whole thing. When you control the hardware and software on both ends it’s easy to make it work smoothly. I experimented with a lot of DLNA software before I found one that was pretty good. And I still don’t use it because I’m just not geared that way, if I was willing to setup a media PC I would but argue with computers all day at work I don’t like to at home. For me stick on a thumbdrive and sneakernet it to the bluray is the way to go.

[antiRepublicrat]

Sorry but a proprietary box that does one thing and doesn't allow me to store media the way I wish is no selling point for me.

It's not a media storage device. It's a media streaming receiver. If you have more than one TV, you don't have to have a computer at each to turn that WiFi bit stream into a signal for the TV. I tried the way of the XBox or PS3 at a TV, too loud, clunky and power hungry. And I'm not doing a PC at a TV for actual use. That' way too low resolution.

[Mad Dawgg]

"That' way too low resolution."

Picture resolution? my computer does 1920x1080p (Blu-ray looks awesome on it.) And I can run it to any of my TVs via my digital cabling network I installed. AND I store lots of media without all the crap the DVDs and Blurays make me sit through each time I want to watch a movie. (Seriously is it really necessary to show me 8 different production company logos and an FBI warning and commercials too. I paid for the damn movie why do I need to watch that crap every time it plays?) and if my Hard drive gos bonkers well I have all those physical discs and I can just reload them all after I rip out the crap commercials and endless logos and lawyer babble.

Sorry but set-top single purpose cash cows for big media is not my cup of tea. Not gonna use them when I can do it better and have all sorts of uses like surfing the internet and watching youtube and playing games thrown into the mix.

[antiRepublicrat]

Picture resolution? my computer does 1920x1080p (Blu-ray looks awesome on it.)

Low resolution for a computer monitor. Most decent 24" monitors, including my five year old one, have a higher resolution than this.

AND I store lots of media without all the crap the DVDs and Blurays make me sit through each time I want to watch a movie.

I like that too, I just like the flexibility of having the computer out of the way of the entertainment system, with a method of having that video beamed to the TV. I sit back and use a remote to select my movie, music, photos or TV show. That's what one of these boxes is, whether it be a Roku, Apple TV, or a Raspberry Pi repurposed (remember, an $80 Roku has less processing power than a $25 computer).

if my Hard drive gos bonkers well I have all those physical discs and I can just reload them all after I rip out the crap commercials and endless logos and lawyer babble.

Which is why I'm looking to build a RAID5 system. If a drive dies, replace it.