Stories leading up to Wednesday’s debut of a $99 Apple TV focused on how some studios were worried about the impact of the Cupertino, Calif. company offering 99-cent episodes. However, the bigger threat from Apple TV may be the damage that can be done to the cable industry’s video-on-demand revenu.
The addition of Netflix and YouTube, along with $4.99 movie streaming not only moves Apple TV out of the self-professed “hobby” classification, but the little box could also “kick the cable companies in the shins in the process,” according to Light Reading.
Apple for now has signed-on just ABC (owned by Disney, where Steve Jobs is the largest shareholder) and Fox (owned by News Corp., whose owner Rupert Murdoch lusts after Apple’s iPad as a savior of print newspapers.) Noticeably missing was NBC, recently purchased by cable giant Comcast. Not only would a 99-cent per episode cause some cable subscribers to pause paying the monthly subscription, but the Apple TV device could also put a crimp in Comcast’s ability to sell video-on-demand.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
