TV Tiptoes into the Web: Why Apple's iTunes Rentals Aren't Game-Changers

“Bear in mind that you still won’t get to watch any ABC show via iTunes until it’s already aired on TV.”

That’s always been true. I would download “Battlestar Galactica” the morning after it aired. Not a problem since the delay is so short.

In addition, Apple TV owners do watch purchased content more than once. Just this month I watched all of the episodes of the defunct “Firefly.” Buying the series on DVD would have cost additional money.

You clearly are not familiar with how people actually have been using Apple’s downloads.

I agree that it isn’t a revolution yet, Peter. But I think, with the expanded market share of all iOS devices, Apple is merely hoping to demonstrate that they can conceive of a media product that is capable of competing with cable. They’ll need to get to 10s of millions of AppleTVs in addition to the ever growing market of iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches and sell 100s of millions of downloads per network (not easy, but within sight, despite past inertia — largely due to the complement of other streaming services and games that moving to iOS provides). Apple knows that it needs better pricing, a larger (essentially complete) catalog, and greater flexibility in packaging to really make a difference. But it needs to prove that it can get within sight of those rebroadcasting fees with its arms tied behind its back (limited offering, crummy pricing, crummy terms, chicken-egg problem for creating the device platform).

It’s not a revolution, but it looks like a better strategy to me than providing torrents and YouTube clips of kittens mixed in with cable listings.

At least Apple hasn’t given up trying. Should companies like Google or Apple or Amazon just give up in trying to cut deals with the networks? At some point in time they’re bound to give in. If Apple get’s iAd working properly, maybe that will give networks the extra revenue push they need. I agree that over the last few years things have been moving slowly, but there are going to be an awful lot of mobile devices capable of viewing video on and I don’t think that can be ignored by the networks. One by one the networks will concede until a tipping point takes place. I can’t wait to dump my TimeWarner Cable TV. It truly sucks. I just need their broadband pipe and I’m even dumping that when they hook up the Verizon FiOS cables that have been hanging from the telephone poles for the last year.

Apple doesn’t have to change the game overnight. It just has to move around some critical pieces over time to give it some advantage.

Who knows what qualifies for a tectonic move? It’s not like Apple wants to hurt their media partners. So there might never be disruptive move from them.

All I know that here’s a customer who has dabbled in iTunes TV downloads before and will be buying way more than twice as many iTunes shows once they’re half the price.

At $1 a pop, people will buy these like candy, and I have a feeling that most of the other networks (and international content owners) will join within a year. After all, there is no new infrastructure to build, all this stuff is already on iTunes.