Analysts Believe Apple going after TV will begin the downfall of Apple. It’s a market Apple has been after for so sometime now but hasn’t been able to conquer it. There has been too many hiccups with trying to develop the Apple TV brand. Should Apple move on from Apple TV??
These TV apps proved unsatisfactory not because of any lack of Apple magic, but because only certain channels were available, and because consumers were allowed only to watch in the home (the whole point of an iPad is its portability). Even so, the Hollywood studios that actually own the shows sued saying the apps violated their contract rights.
Apple’s fans imagine the company can do for TV what it did for music: breaking up the existing distribution model. Forget about it. Television is about to demonstrate the inadequacy of Apple’s own businessmodel.
Video-content owners, including everyone from the TV networks and Hollywood and the NFL and Major League Baseball, aren’t the music industry or even the book industry. Video-content owners aren’t looking for a savior and ultimately won’t be satisfied with anything less than an open ecosystem accessible by any device.
They’ll have no choice: Content owners already see their business being upended by Netflix and Amazon Instant Video, with an approach adapted to digital ubiquity from the get-go. They also know, if they sit still, their current partners, the cable industry and its analogues, will simply take advantage, as satellite operator DISH is doing with its ad-skipping function that so infuriates the TV networks.
In such a world, Apple will have to change too. To maintain its position, the company will have to focus more on giving its devices superb access to content it doesn’t control and hasn’t approved.
Can Apple CEO Tim Cook and company make the turn? Two years ago, in a column on the Microsofting of Apple, we noted that a company preoccupied with products was in danger of becoming a company preoccupied with “strategy”—which we defined as zero-sum maneuvering versus hated rivals.
Yep. Apple’s rejection of Google’s superior maps is an obvious example, but it goes with the turf. Apple’s spectacular success with devices naturally led to the temptation of a network-effects empire. To such empires, maps are just too important as a way to gather information about users and hit them with ads and e-commerce opportunities.
A similar miscalculation led Microsoft to treat Netscape as a mortal threat and into a self-defeating tussle with a reciprocally purblind Justice Department. The Web did indeed create enormous opportunities that were seized by companies other than Microsoft, but Microsoft is still around and doing fine.
Let it be said that some techies see evidence of a more rational impulse within Apple. They say Apple’s browser and HTML5 support are conspicuously superior to Android’s. Within Apple apparently there are teams committed to making sure Apple devices are competitive in the open-ecosystem world that is coming.
[wsj]
