In the months leading up to the announcement of the new Apple TV box last year, there were multiple reports that said the company was also working on a streaming TV service as a way to entice cord-cutters and “cord-nevers” into its ecosystem. Those reports suggested that the service would include some 25 channels and cost $30 or $40 a month, and it would stream live content as well as offer a Netflix-esque back catalog of shows on demand.
But it never came to pass. When the new Apple TV launched, Apple pushed apps as the future of TV rather than an all-in-one service. A new report from the Wall Street Journal today says that Apple’s negotiating tactics were to blame and that the service didn’t come to pass in part because Apple was offering too little money and making too many demands.
The source article is behind a paywall, so hence the link to the Ars story instead. You can try and use this link through Google to get the source article.
Oh my God, I can totally see how wearing jeans and a colourful shirt would invalidate a multi-million dollar business deal!
Are TV executives for real, or have they not noticed that people are slowly moving away from their traditional media? Their head-in-the-sand attitude reminds me of the music industry in the 90’s, who insisted that online music would never be a thing on their watch until events overtook them.
TV has been around for well over 60 years. Senior Executives who have worked their way up through the system are often in their 60s, 70s or even 80s. They tend to wear bespoke suits, hand made shoes and cufflinks. They would consider wearing jeans and Hawaiian shirts to a meeting be extremely disrespectful.
Edited 2016-07-29 09:55 UTC
You’ve hit it right on the head, in fact. Most TV execs have their heads… well, I’m not sure if in the sand is exactly where they have them, but the sun definitely doesn’t reach
. These are the people that run Comcast and like-minded companies after all, so yes, they are out of touch with the modern time. Completely out of touch.
Still, part of good negotiations is to know your partners. If one knows that their potential partners are traditional, one ought not go out of their way to offend their sensibilities if one wants the deal to even have a chance, regardless what one thinks of the values held by the other party. It’s bad business to deliberately piss off one’s potential partners.
So you advocate showing up to formal events/meetings wearing informal attire? Good luck getting a job.
While I’m a huge advocate of wearing shorts and t-shirt everywhere (I live in Central Florida, we just had 22 days of 95+ weather so far this year), I recognize that formal attire must be worn for formal occasions. It is, in fact, disrespectful to your audience to be severely under dressed.
As for the rest of the story, I think Apple went in with the mind set “we’re Apple, everything we touch turns into gold, if they don’t sign-up with us, their loss.” Except that now they have a platform with no (or severely lacking amount of) content. Had they bagged at least 1 network, they would have been set, but with none, their offering is dead on the water. Hulu already provides popular shows 1 day after airing, Netflix has great original content and Amazon Prime Video is “free” (I use that term loosely) for Prime members. What is Apple offering? Some show called “Planet of the Apps”? Currently, all they have, everyone already has, too. Their platform isn’t compelling to switchers.
Plus, you need an Apple TV. I have a Roku and most folks I know use their Smart TV. A couple (literally 2) of my friends Apple TVs, but they already sign-up for Hulu and Netflix.
I suspect that is almost precisely what happened. Apple had the advantage with ITunes because they had the iPod and were legitimising a huge market. Apple TV is severely lagging behind services like Netflix, so they can’t just show up and be the messiah.
Having said that, TV executives should have noted by now that companies with lots of cash will find a way; Netflix started to produce original content. So could Apple. Eventually the old school television & movie studios may find that the market for their Golden Goose Eggs may have disappeared.
Vanders,
Maybe a dumb question, but what is a “jumper”?
What I found is permanently going to chance my vision of you!
http://www.karmaloop.com/product/The-Maddie-Jumper-in-Black/590025
Maybe I ought to give the jumper a try, haha
It’s nice, but it’s not my style.
s/jumper/sweater/ if you prefer American English!
Depending on the position a sweater could be perfectly acceptable. The basic rule for interviewing is to dress slight up from the dress code of the position.
If the situation called for everyone to be in Hawaiian shirts and one person showed up in a suit it would be equally inappropriate and disrespectful. Unless there’s a specific reason to be dressed diametrically different from the meeting attendees or your reputation of dress style is known and accepted by them it’s a unacceptable. It can be seen as disrespectful, conceit, maverick, etc… Take your pick. But it shows you’re not there to really work with others but to do your own thing.
Which it exactly was. I don’t think the clothes was an accident. The representative from Apple deliberately dressed differently to set themselves apart from the others, to seem like they are more “modern” and above standard rules.
It WAS disrespect.
Edited 2016-07-29 22:44 UTC
Out of interest: if the meeting had been at Apple, and the media executives arrives in suits but everyone else was wearing jeans; would the TV executives be disrespectful?
Don’t apologise for using proper English! Remember the rubbish that we have to put up with from the Yanks.
Oh, no… he didn’t dress like them. He didn’t follow their silly, little dress code of all dressing the same. The horror.
Macka,
Hey I don’t care, it’d be hilarious to see anyone show up one day in something like this:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/224909597/mens-harem-yoga-pants-elastic…
I’d buy the guy a beer for sure
Edited 2016-07-30 02:04 UTC
You don’t have to agree with American (business) culture but you should at least acknowledge it. Not in every case but generally speaking image speaks volumes about a persons character, especially here where image is highly valued. It’s not unreasonable that formal dress is expected in formal situations. It is disrespectful to show up looking the same way you do as when you’re hanging out with friends or on vacation unless it’s already been established that doing so is ok. People who present themselves poorly in professional or formal situations come up short in other areas as well. I wouldn’t be chomping on the bit to be in business with those people either.
I have the luxury of being able to dress however I want most of the time but like you, I also own some nice suits for occasions that call for that. It’s nothing to freak out about.
ilovebeer,
I did a short stint as the sole IT guy at a small company earning some $11/hr. I was in a small back room all to myself all day. I got warned by a female boss about wearing shorts. I thought to myself how petty is that, it’s not as if I were in a formal environment, nobody else ever went back there. Why is it acceptable for women to wear skirts but men can’t where shorts?
Since then I’ve always worn dress clothing to satisfy social expectations, but to me it says more about how fake and shallow society is rather than anything about my character.
It does, but that doesn’t change that we have to deal with it.
I don’t think having different expectations, dress or otherwise, for different settings is unreasonable or deems society fake & shallow. We can debate whether or not appearance should matter as much as it does, but there’s no denying the fact that we live in a society where it does matter. Appearance is a major consideration in judgment, that’s just the truth, like it or not. While there’s an argument to be made for dressing any way you like, there’s also an argument against it in that you simply don’t care about social acceptance or how others perceive you. In a world where people have to interact and work together, work dress code may not be a worthy battle to choose.
Wearing shorts has never made me any less capable of performing my work duties. Neither has wearing pajamas. Does that mean there should be no lines drawn at all? How much respect would people have for world leaders if they showed up to work in board shorts & flip flops or sneakers & tracksuits?
I don’t have a problem with expectations, even when I don’t necessarily agree with them. I’m not going to blow a fuse because I’m expected to wear a suit to important meetings or events. It’s just not much to ask in my opinion. It may seem silly to demand the lone IT guy tucked away out of everyones view is expected to meet a dress code but it’s the right of the employer to expect it. While shorts and pajamas have never hindered my abilities, neither has a pair of slacks or a suit.
Try crawling under desks to wire up cables in one.
Only being slightly facetious. Sure you can do it, but then you have to spend time fixing your appearance when you’re done. Right pain in the behind if you ask me where a more casual dress would be more fitting for that kind of work, yet employers still demand business dress.
ilovebeer,
If you were talking about the sales staff who went to trade shows, then sure. They needed to find customers and close sales. I wouldn’t have minded dressing up to go to fancy meetings with executives and what not, but that just didn’t describe my job at all. They even had me cut the lawn when their regular guy wasn’t there, and I didn’t complain.
Edited 2016-07-29 21:06 UTC
No traditional TV is still doing very well. Realtime views are down and ads for them are as well, but they have streaming rights they can sell to the highest bidder ( netflix, hulu, amazon). The way they deliver content is changing, but they’re not doing a bad job adapting.
Sure, they’re still content creators and they’re distributing via. these new fangled online streaming services. Except the streaming services are starting to create their own content; once Netflix is producing >50% of it’s own content, what power do the traditional broadcast media, with their geographically segmented markets and old-school syndication rules and reliance on overnight viewing figures, have?
Some of the content that the streaming services are producing are actually produced by the same companies that sell to broadcast networks and its just that the streaming networks are won the rights. It’s basically a bidding war between networks, cable stations and streaming services to carry content now. Not to mention deals with exclusivity and post air streaming.
Good lord! Does it cost that much in the US for TV? 40 freakin’ dollars per month?
No! In fact, you’re lucky if you get cable at that price. Most times, unless you bundle, it can hit $60 just for what we call “basic.” This is why I do not have cable except for home internet–and you should see what the average price is for that! I got lucky getting it for $40/month.
I don’t know about dish-based systems or what their costs are, and there are some digital stations in most areas broadcast free of charge. But on average, $40/month is a good deal here considering what your average cost is.
Geez. And people complain about the BBC licence fee.
Broadcast television is free which for most urban areas is 3-5 broadcasters who might each broad cast 3 channels, but cable packages which range from 30-90 channels can cost between 60-110 USD a month.
A relative recently signed up for Xfinity/Comcast cable tv + internet. It’s their top tier package excluding spanish channels. 260 channels, up to 75mbit downstream internet, $130/month for the first year as a promotional price. Then it jumps to $160/month. Of the 260 channels you get, basically half of the are SD while the other half is their HD counterparts. So really you’re getting 130 channels because it’s stupid to say, for example, NBC and NBC HD are 2 different channels.
Without the internet service, the pricing was $99 the first year, then $148 afterwards. So yeah, tv cost here in the USA is dumb.
Around here (North Texas), you can get “Starter” cable from Time Warner for $19.99 per month for a year, then it goes up to $28.00 per month. This barely includes anything more than what you can get over-the-air free.
I pay nearly $70 per month for internet (on special!), and do not pay for any TV. Thankfully, they can’t filter out all of the channels when you receive internet, so I do receive several channels as well. They keep trying to get me to add Television for an extra $10! If I could, I’d use an alternate internet provider and drop them altogether!
Out of curiosity, what is the cost in your neck of the woods?
I almost have to get it with internet. My 50Mbit connection costs 40€ per month as a minimum, it costs 45€ per month including basic cable (and both contains a phone-line, not that I have it connected).
You could call that 45€ per month for cable, but I see it as 5€ per month as I would have internet anyway.
And that is the expensive former state monopoly, most other services are cheaper.
Thats really good. There *are* a few like that sprinkled around here, offered by smaller regional companies, but if you aren’t in their area, no luck. Also, I’ve heard the internet service is slightly questionable with more packet loss than some one like myself would be okay with.
With music Apple when to record labels and got exclusive or strict deals to provide digital media distribution for them since the couldn’t decide on one for themselves. And Apple had little in the way of competition at the time.
Fast forward today with TV shows and it’s a completely different market. Networks want to control their own content and distribution. There also are a lot of production houses who produce tv shows independent of networks. In an interview with an exec from Scott Free Productions he alluded that there’s just money on the table now for production houses because they have many more avenues of distribution. They can basically pick the network, and/or streaming service of there choice for what ever reasons. Why would they give that up for exclusive or restrictive deals with Apple.
The only way for Apple to get ahead in this market would be to set-up a streaming service that’s accessible and beats all others in every way, and be open as well. The fact that you can play most streaming services on any device is why I think the services are doing as well as they are. It makes me cringe at the thought of Apple entering the streaming TV space with them developing a service with exclusive content on an exclusive device. No thanks. I want multiple services with one device of my choice on the TV.
Apple’s making a fundamental mistake, which is easy to make for a lot of people. That is, the TV networks don’t generally OWN or MAKE a lot of the shows they air. They buy them from production companies and studios and suppliers. The TV networks exist only as middlemen in cahoots with local TV stations (who are yet more middlemen) to sell ads around which they wrap these shows.
Apple is trying to upend that entire middlemen business model without assurances of money. Right now, the networks are getting revenue via the old way. Local stations get big checks for being affiliates. If a network lets Apple stream, the local stations will have a FIT and the networks need those stations or else they can’t sell ads.
What Apple should do, then, is go directly to the studios and production companies and even actors and buy the shows direct. This is what both Netflix and Amazon have done in some cases. They don’t need to work with a network when they can buy the show directly. Unfortunately, this means Apple cannot offer a cord-cutting cable box kind of service but they really don’t need to be trying to emulate a broken business model anyway.
They are not thinking different at all. They want to offer you the same thing you already have. Jobs would never have gone for that. He’d want something innovative and different or else it’s not worth doing. So giving up on it is the only sensible thing Apple has actually done here.
saloonguy,
Except that Jobs was at the helm during the failed efforts to get the balling rolling through 2009 mentioned in the article. In 2013 they tried and failed again when he was no longer there, but to say “He’d want something innovative and different or else it’s not worth doing” is revisionist at best. That’s the thing about idols, there’s a tendency to attribute all the success to them but all the failure to other people.