Apple Seems Set to Unveil… Cable TV
I love to write about bundles. Love it. Bundles. Unbundled. Re-bundled. Bundles. Bundles. Bundles.
So when I was thinking about tomorrow’s Apple event, where the company is expected to unveil their latest service offerings — including, notably, a new television service — I went back and read some of my posts over the last five years. That’s when I realized that I actually didn’t need to write a new post at all. Instead, I could just excerpt old ones to piece together exactly what it sure sounds like Apple is going to unveil in the television department tomorrow.
That is: a great re-bundling of much of the content we just spent the better part of the last decade un-bundling from the cable bundle. (I’ll go ahead and write the new post anyway, with a sampling of said excerpts down below.)
Which is to say, after a decade-plus of failed attempts to re-invent television, Apple clearly had a revelation: it’s hard to re-invent television. And so instead, Apple will re-create it. Despite all the hoopla, what Apple is set to unveil seems to be little more than the cable bundle of old, albeit with a new content base, slightly altered technology,¹ and undoubtedly a better UI.²
And even this isn’t a new concept. This is essentially the same thing Amazon has been doing for years now with Channels. They’ve been having success up-selling the HBOs and Showtimes of the world on top of their Prime Video base layer. Apple is about to do the same, what they’ve “invented” is their own base layer. It did cost a billion dollars to create, but little-to-no new tech was needed. The billion dollars was for content. Table stakes, these days.
To be fair, there may be some clever packaging in the way Apple re-sells these bundles. Mix-and-match bundles, you say? But again, the cable players were doing this years ago.
The much more interesting thing Apple brings to the table is a single number: 1.4 billion. That is, the number of iOS devices out there in the wild. Amazon can’t offer this. Netflix can’t offer this. And certainly any single cable player can’t offer this. Apple is attempting to re-create the cable bundle, but for hundreds of millions of potential subscribers right out of the gate.³
And if Apple really does offer this to non-Apple devices — something which would have seemed crazy a couple years ago, but now crazily seems a certainty, at least eventually⁴ — the numbers just go up from there.
Anyway, this all sounds better than the current state of Apple’s art. They already essentially have the UI in place to do at least part of what they’re trying to do with the TV app on their Apple TV devices. But that app is almost comically bad.⁵ You click on a recommendation, you’re shown which app it’s in, you may or may not have said app, you click a button to open in said app (if you have said app), which forces you to actually open said app (if you have said app), which then loads the show. Or tells you, for example, that you need to subscribe to Showtime via Amazon Video to watch said recommended show. And you see this all play out in front of you. It’s like the cable bundle held together by duct tape. This new one — if Apple is indeed hosting the content and streaming it themselves, which is wild,⁶ but also makes sense given the aforementioned sentences — should be a much better experience.
But again, it’s not a particularly new experience. It’s mainly a new UI put on the old cable-era one, which Apple themselves helped usher out thanks to the app era. Funny that.
And yet, it also won’t be the one-bundle-to-rule-them-all, as cable was in the past. First and foremost, because Netflix isn’t playing ball. Funny that. Will one of the “skinny bundles” (those that re-skinned the base content layer of the old cable bundle) such as DirectTV Now, YouTube TV, Hulu, or the like? Maybe, maybe not!
So yeah, this is a re-bundling, but bundles of bundles are still going to be the new norm. Apple just wants to be the new main bundle. Maybe that works thanks to the aforementioned installed base. Or if their bundle offering is creative enough.⁷ Or if their content is good enough. All of those remain question marks. And I expect those to remain even after tomorrow.
All the pieces have been slowly getting put in place for a while now. And the writing has been on the wall. And other metaphors.
2015:
2017:
2018:
¹ I mean, it’s still going to be delivered to many people via the literal cable of old (though perhaps many more via the wireless carriers as well now).
² And, unbelievably, perhaps an even-worse remote control! Worse than this!
³ Obviously, the 1.4 billion number includes many households with multiple devices, so we can cut that number quite a bit. And such numbers undoubtedly won’t be feasible over night, as there will be worldwide rights issues, etc. But Apple does this better than anyone…
⁴ Now the iTunes on Samsung TV thing seems to make a lot more sense. As expected.
⁵ One has to wonder if Apple didn’t think they were going to launch this new service much sooner than they actually did…
⁶ Apple, of course, wants to operate this way (while taking their cut, no less). It’s just amazing that the current content players would let them do this. Sure, Apple is taking on the cost of hosting and serving up the content, but there’s perhaps a much bigger, less immediately tangible cost that these guys are seemingly not thinking about here (though others are)!
⁷ What if they — wait for it — bundle these new television bundles with their other offerings such as Apple Music, Apple News, and iCloud. Super Ultra Mega Bundle — aka “Apple Prime”!
Apple Seems Set to Unveil… Cable TV
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