Apple reportedly has a new plan for selling TV, with the goal of selling customers a premium TV bundle, grouping together HBO, Showtime, and Starz.
Although Apple TV already offers these channels on their own, bundling them together as part of a package would take Apple one step closer to its goal of being a serious TV player — and making Apple TV a bit more appealing in the process.
At present, Apple sells HBO for $15 per month, Showtime for $11 per month, and Starz for $9 a month. It’s not yet known what kind of deal Apple is looking to strike by packaging them together — or how much they would be priced at for consumers.
The company previously ran into problems selling TV packages because traditional television networks didn’t want to make the kind of concessions Apple was after. However, since HBO, Showtime and Starz are all networks Apple distributes, bundling them together may prove less painful.
According to a report last year, Eddy Cue angered TV execs at companies like Disney and Time Warner during their negotiations. “Apple’s Mr. Cue arrived 10 minutes late and was wearing jeans, tennis shoes with no socks, and a Hawaiian shirt. The other executives were wearing suits,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “Apple wanted full on-demand seasons of hit shows and rights to a vast, cloud-based digital video recorder that would automatically store top programs and allow ad-skipping in newly aired shows.”
Something needs to change
Despite Apple’s history with multimedia and negotiating big deals with entertainment companies, Apple TV has thus far failed to deliver as promised. Recent data from eMarketer suggested that Apple is currently “at the bottom of the U.S. connected TV market, behind Google Chromecast and Roku, with its share shrinking.”
It has failed to become the game platform many of us were optimistic about, and while Apple is reportedly upping its focus on introducing original Netflix-style TV programming, these shows are intended more as Apple Music add-ons, rather than as something designed to sell the Apple TV.
Would TV bundles make Apple TV more enticing to you? Leave your comments below.
Source: Recode
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
4 responses to “Apple TV could package HBO, Showtime and Starz as a bundle”
Bundled channels are exactly why everyone is “cord cutting”.
But not if we can also choose a la carte for the rest of our channels. Bundles are great if they are flexible and save you money while giving you what you want and not a lot of what you don’t. Giving me a bunch of filler channels in my main package just so you can say I have a 70 channel package isn’t a good bundle but allowing me to bundle showtime, HBO and Starz would be awesome.
Too bad Apple is late to the game and PS Vue beat them to this.
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With Sling and Vue and DTV Now and soon YoutubeTV hitting the sweet spot of $40 for a decent bundle I don’t see Apple having a future. The competition works across platforms and are rapidly improving. Meanwhile AppleTV is becoming a joke.