Apple’s cable TV pitch

Apple is shopping a $30-a-month subscription TV service around to broadcast and cable TV networks, according to Peter Kafka at The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital. The service would be offered through iTunes and not tied to Apple devices. Do Comcast and Time Warner have anything to worry about?

Apple’s finally got the right idea: “We’ve heard these rumors before—but that doesn’t mean they’re not true,” says Peter Burrows in BusinessWeek. And Apple’s approach, “if the company can pull it off,” makes more sense than its old TV scheme, which hinged on getting people to buy its set-top-box, AppleTV. We think of TV as a service, so with a subscription service Apple would be giving people "more of what they really want—a lower bill, anywhere access, without having to buy another gizmo."

“Apple to reinvent Apple TV ... for the rest of us”

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The big TV networks won’t bite: Does this rumor “sound fishy? It is,” says Andrew Heining in The Christian Science Monitor. This will go nowhere without buy-in from at least “the big-three networks” and HBO—and why would they “risk incurring the wrath of major cable providers”? There’s also the issue of size. “Americans like big,” so it’s hard to see paying to watch TV on a 15-inch laptop screen.

“Apple’s $30 a month TV subscription service? Not buying it.”

Cable TV is going down either way: Oh, “it’s going to happen, the only question is when,” says Jeff Bertolucci in PC World. Thanks to broadband Internet, "the cable TV industry’s monopolistic, anti-consumer practice of offering bloated, overpriced programming packages is coming mercifully to an end”—and “there’s a very good chance” Apple will be the one to “give the cable guy the heave-ho. We’ll find out soon enough.”

“Apple iTunes TV pitch: Another nail in cable’s coffin”