The Disney market cap is 90 billion dollars, which in theory Apple could afford in March when they had 100 billion on hand but you generally don’t buy a company for just their market cap. If they wanted to do that sort of thing much better to go for Viacom (26B) or to have beaten Comcast to the NBC/ Universal deal (13B). The fact that they didn’t shows they don’t actually want to be in that end of the business, they’re gunning for Netflix’s end of the business, cheaper entry, less hassles with government entities.
That was Apple’s US cash on hand. They’ve got a ton more earned offshore that they don’t bring back in due to the tax laws.
It’s not just ABC/ESPN/Disney. That group owns or has significant interest in a lot other networks, plus radio, movie and music distribution, and publishing. If Apple wants to control the media market, they could hardly ask for a better place to start.
Plus, Apple (and specifically Jobs) has long had a good relationship with Disney, so that makes a merger/buyout idea make more sense for them rather than another media group.
Still... trying to figure out Apple’s strategies has been the bane of many a pundit, so if I’m way off base, at least I’ve got a lot of company. ;)
Apple builds hardware.
That’s what they do.
Everything else is provided just to facilitate selling hardware. They may make a sizable profit on non-hardware sales (iTunes), or sink a lot of money into services (iCloud), but it’s all just to feed back into promoting more hardware sales.
Apple doesn’t want to move into large-scale content creation. It’s just not what they do. There’s too much distracting overhead to make it happen, effort which doesn’t translate well into more hardware sales.
Better to build an Apple TV ecosystem which will have content creators beating down the door. iOS 6 may very well have an Apple TV App Store; give users the choice of app “channels”, and you’ll see Disney & Viacom & NBC & near everyone else rolling onto the platform almost overnight. Better to create a “build it and they will come” environment than to pay billions to force them to; you start paying and they’ll hold out for more, but give users a choice and providers will climb over each other to get there.