Apple TV+ Offers Highest Quality 4K Streaming, Averaging Up to 29Mbps

Apple is a fine company now. Steve Jobs is what made it legendary. What they accomplished in about 10 years at his prime was truly astounding, no matter how some try and downplay it.

Knowingly or not, most Apple fans were really always just Steve Jobs fans. I do wish we could see what the company would be now under his leadership, he went too soon.
 
What Steve Jobs did was entering or creating market segments when the time was "ready", there had been smartphones and ipads done by Microsoft 10 years earlier, but the technology wasn't there yet to make them viable. Now it seems Apple is back in the same old "we go were others have gone before successfully" and not paving their own way. I mean, they might win the streaming wars, but the fact is that it is a very viable market to start with, and therefore they aren't breaking new ground, they are more or less showing they were late to the party and now trying to crash it (not the kind of leadership that Steve Jobs would have shown).
 
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stoneinapond said:
Where do you suggest they start? And what kind of gadget would satisfy an unquenchable desire for the next......?
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Just stating the facts, could be that everything that should be invented has been invented... or could be just that they like before are waiting for something old to mature to the point they can make a "ahaa, we did it first" even though they weren't first... I'm not an apple user so I don't care for them anyways...
 
It's not too late for anyone to enter the streaming business. At best, the current subscriber totals are around 200 million. They're likely to to be in tens of billions, with people having a paid access to 3-5 different services.

The real question is how all these services will differentiate themselves from each other and the current leader Netflix.
 
DLD said:
It's not too late for anyone to enter the streaming business. At best, the current subscriber totals are around 200 million. They're likely to to be in tens of billions, with people having a paid access to 3-5 different services.

The real question is how all these services will differentiate themselves from each other and the current leader Netflix.
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Of course it is not too late, it is just not an "untapped market". I.e. Apple haven't really now in a couple of years proven to be doing anything but incremental improvements, maybe that is fine and maybe they don't need to worry about Samsung and China eating their market share. Maybe there is plenty of space and money to be had for lots of companies. Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing Apple for not innovating new cool stuff every year, they might just be fine in the long run by just doing what they been doing last 5 years.
 
DLD said:
It's not too late for anyone to enter the streaming business. At best, the current subscriber totals are around 200 million. They're likely to to be in tens of billions, with people having a paid access to 3-5 different services.

The real question is how all these services will differentiate themselves from each other and the current leader Netflix.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, I think that all the different property/IP owners are going to see their content as "special" and they will pull it from existing streaming services and you will have to subscribe to their service if you want to watch their content. Which is the exact opposite of what the consumer really wants, which is just one or two services with EVERYTHING available. Even now, it's currently a crap shoot with streaming regarding what is available and what isn't. What ticks me off, is that one week a movie is available and the next, it's gone. I pay over $200/month for Directv, I have Amazon Prime, which includes their streaming of movies and shows and I also pay for Netflix, yet there are so many movies that aren't available on any of them and only available 'a la carte' as an individual rental or purchase from someone like Apple or Amazon, etc. It really irks me when the latest part of a movie series is available on one of the services I have, but the preceding part, that I may not have seen is not and the only way I can see it is to rent of buy it when I'm already paying a ton per month for these video streaming services and it was just available within the last few months/weeks.

I see the fragmentation as only a bad thing for the consumer.
 
stoneinapond said:
Where do you suggest they start? And what kind of gadget would satisfy an unquenchable desire for the next......?
Click to expand...

Something like google glass, but less nerdy and more useful, so that people actually want to use it. Maybe even with brain command instead of voice command. And they're getting interesting patents in these areas so I think they're going there.

I think Apple is at it best when they think out of the box and build the first version of something... that actually works. I wasn't in that market but maybe the first mac fell there. What's definitely there is the first ipod, the first iphone, the first ipad.
And almost everybody else is better at refining previously-existing products. That's why android phones are so much better than iphones nowadays, from a UI standpoint. The "go back" button on the latest iphone is still in a place that made perfect sense on the tiny iphone 4, but in 8 years nobody at Apple seems to have noticed how cumbersome it is to have to click the top left corner so often.

I don't think the streaming TV business is one where Apple will shine. If the HBO service was the standard, then yes, there's plenty of scope for improvement (their client is awful: it needs a powerful computer to run without hiccups, it can't remember what you were watching, it only recommends based on corporate interest and not user tastes). But Netflix already provides a good user experience, with a client that is nice to use and mostly gets out of the way.
This war will be won or lost based on content licences, though. Maybe Apple's cash mountain can help them there.
 
High1ander said:
Of course it is not too late, it is just not an "untapped market" ...
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While it may not be virgin territories - my guesstimate was low, the total is around 300 mil - but the future total is likely to be far greater. Right now, very few have more than three services. In the future, it may be half a dozen, with several (discounted) accounts per household.

Run&Gun said:
... I see the fragmentation as only a bad thing for the consumer.
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Within several years, one should see consolidation a la XM and Sirius.

Of course, Sirius bought out XM and is now profitable with much higher monthly fees and a fairly low quality sound. But it's satellite and hopefully be forced by compete by 5G streaming of Pandora, Spotify, iTunes, etc..

Samuel H said:
... This war will be won or lost based on content licences, though. Maybe Apple's cash mountain can help them there.
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It's not just cash. Apple sells over quarter billion iPhones a year (plus Macs, iPads, etc.), which gives them a size 100 foot in the door. Let's say Apple has a 50% retention rate after one year. That's (125M x $5) $625M in subscriber revenues monthly. Cook's probably waiting for the base to add up. He shouldn't.
 
DLD said:
While it may not be virgin territories - my guesstimate was low, the total is around 300 mil - but the future total is likely to be far greater. Right now, very few have more than three services. In the future, it may be half a dozen, with several (discounted) accounts per household.

Within several years, one should see consolidation a la XM and Sirius.

Of course, Sirius bought out XM and is now profitable with much higher monthly fees and a fairly low quality sound. But it's satellite and hopefully be forced by compete by 5G streaming of Pandora, Spotify, iTunes, etc..

It's not just cash. Apple sells over quarter billion iPhones a year (plus Macs, iPads, etc.), which gives them a size 100 foot in the door. Let's say Apple has a 50% retention rate after one year. That's (125M x $5) $625M in subscriber revenues monthly. Cook's probably waiting for the base to add up. He shouldn't.
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Yeah, I'm thinking that the next several years, it's going to be a stinky swampy mess as everyone jumps into streaming and pulls their content onto their own service and away from the others, then hopefully it shakes out to just one or two(or three) and pretty much everything is available to the consumer on one or two services.

Sirius probably did some serious miscalculations in the early days. Of my two vehicles, one of them has an aftermarket receiver with lifetime service, that I've had for 14 years. I won that one. I should have put it on my second vehicle when I bought it(they still offered it when I bought it, but only if you asked for it), but I didn't and they (smartly) got rid of the lifetime subscriptions in the last few years. And yes, the sound quality sucks, but I can listen to the same channels I like no matter where I drive and not have to rely on commercial laden over-the-air radio. But over the air FM has superior sound quality. I have HD radio, as well, but it is similar to Sirius in its sound. Maybe not as bad, but not as good as analog FM.

Speaking of foot in the door, I guess because ov my iPhone purchase the other month, Apple is offering me a free year of Apple TV+.
 
Samuel H said:
(According to your numbers, the first word should be trillion too: one did 100x, the other one did 3x - not a fan of Jobs but if we're using numbers better use them right)
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Correct. That was a mis-speak.
 
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Very timely XD
(for the record: I posted 5 hours earlier than them)

I've been seeing news about patents, rumors, etc, for the past few moths. It makes perfect sense too.
 
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