Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) thinks it may have found a way to drum up interest in Apple TV. The company has apparently put aside (for now) the idea of delivering a selected group (skinny bundle) of TV channels costing around $30 a month in favor of allowing pay TV providers to offer their own bundles at their own price.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Apple’s senior vice-president of internet software and services Eddy Cue, said that consumers are not getting what they want from cable and satellite companies. What consumers want is seamless access to their choice of video content, and Apple is going to provide the platform for content aggregators to give consumers what they want.
The company last week announced an app from CBS News that gives everyone with Apple TV free, 24-hour access to CBS News programming. It’s just one of more than 40 apps available on Apple TV, some of which come with no additional cost and others, like HBO Go, that charge their own monthly fees or require authentication that a user has a subscription through another pay TV package.
Apple TV’s summer promotions include every episode of “The Simpsons” since that franchise began in the late 1980s, a free 7-day trial of the History Channel and the Lifetime Movie Club (each $3.99 month following the trial period), a free one-week trial to Hulu and free one- month trials Netflix and HBO NOW.
Apple has been unable to convince content providers to provide a la carte access to their programming; if you want Fox, you get FX whether you want it or not. By providing the Apple TV platform and letting distributors decide on their own bundling, Apple gets part of the way toward a skinny bundle and the advantage for consumers is that they get to choose what goes into the bundle.
As for rumors that Apple plans to get into the original content game alongside Netflix and Amazon, Cue told Hollywood Reporter that the company is “only going into the content business [with projects] that we think are really tied to our products. Right now, that’s Apple Music.”
Cue also said the company is not “at this point, certainly” trying to buy a studio. Why should it? If Apple can succeed in changing the content distribution model and collect its payments from other content providers without buying a studio it stands to make its first game-changing innovation since the iPhone.
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