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Apple wants to show TV for $30 on iTunes
By siliconindia
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Tuesday, 03 November 2009, 22:14 IST
Bangalore: Apple has been busy meeting up with TV operators to convince them to offer monthly subscription service to deliver TV programs on iTunes. Apple might use these services for Apple TV or its yet to come PC tablet but All Things Digital says that there are more chances that Apple will go for its 100 million customers of iTunes.
In order to get this service rolling Apple will have to convince TV operators. Apple has told industry executives it wants to launch the service early next year but so far there has been no confirmation of a deal. Although, industry executives believe that Disney will be the first one to experiment with this. Disney was the first to sell its programming on iTunes, via a la carte downloads. And Apple CEO Steve Jobs is Disney's largest single shareholder, a result of Disney's 2006 acquisition of Jobs' Pixar animation studio.
Cable networks, for instance, don't want to threaten existing relationships and subscription fees from cable providers like Comcast. And programmers are also worried about the effect a subscription service would have on advertising revenue: Even if the service didn't distribute TV programs until after their initial air date, that could cut into ratings, which now measure viewership over the course of several days.
The move to deliver TV and movies over the Web is already well under way. Netflix, for instance, already bundles free streaming movie and TV along with its disc-by-mail subscription service. iTunes and Amazon rent movies on a one-off basis, and Google's YouTube is trying out the same thing. And Hulu, the joint venture between GE's NBC, News Fox, and ABC, is figuring out how to launch a paid service that may include rentals, paid downloads or subscriptions.
