Don’t be a Blockbuster
It’s not uncommon to find articles about a new/revised Apple product changing the world; fan boys do exist. While I would certainly count myself among the Apple fans, a fan boy I am not. As Trekker is to Trekkie, I try to keep my bias this side of abject worship, but I do believe Apple TV can change the world – at least the broadcast world.
Make no mistake: Apple is in the process of staging a coup. That’s what a very close look at the new Apple TV reveals. Despite its somewhat innocuous appearance and diminutive stature, it’s a weapon of war. The opponent? The entrenched cable and satellite TV service providers.
via Why Apple TV is a Ticking Time Bomb for Big Cable: Apple «.The Apple Blog
Blockbuster laughed publicly whenever possible at the upstart Netflix and their obviously absurd business model (at least as seen by Blockbuster), but now Netflix services are being incorporated into Apple TV, Google TV, gaming consoles, PCs, Internet ready TVs and nearly every mobile device capable of accepting streaming video while Blockbuster files for Chapter 11.
Several factors, in my opinion, are converging to make the scenario portrayed below very realistic in my opinion:
- broadband subscribers now outnumber dial-up subscribers (Really? Dial-up?)
- broadband technology improvements make more bandwidth available to consumers
- mobile devices are feeding the culture of delivering multimedia without physical media
- the model of paying for 375 channels to get the 5 you really watch is dying
It may not be tomorrow, it may not be next week, but I do believe Apple TV and technologies like it (Google TV) are going to redefine what we expect from content delivery just as the iPhone totally changed what the public expected from a mobile device.
