Just because you continue to pay Comcast prices doesn't mean the ATV has somehow become dated and mediocre ? That's nonsense. That may be your usage scenerio, but that doesn't apply to everyone or the product in it's entirety.
Lack of 4K support when your competition has it for almost a year now does mean "ATV has somehow become dated and mediocre", though.
The story is basically the same one we've heard in every market in which Apple participates. That being, Apple's sales are not growing as fast as the overall market. What's new? I'll bet Coach sales have rarely grown as fat as the overall handbag market. All markets have segments, and the growth in the lower-priced, commoditized segments is almost always faster than the higher-priced premium segments. No surprise there. wheres the money being made, and is Apple profiting handsomely in its segment, while growing? Thosecare the questions to ask.
On a side note, it seems Wall St likes to anchor on all the wrong things. For example, if a company [Apple], participates in a market, Wall St myopically measures its success by focusing on just that one market, and usually the wrong metrics of true success (profit would be where I'd start, rarely where Wall St starts). And what about measuring against other businesses. If I own a coffee shop that does half as well as Starbucks, but three times as well as any other business in my neighborhood, guess what... I made a good decision to start a coffee shop rather than a hat store. Apple is a better business than KO or AMZN, once you back up and look down from the 10,000' height. And yet, bizarrely, it's assigned a significantly lower valuation than either.
This is dumb. Not everything can be spun in favor of the ridiculous Windows to Mac/Android to iOS arguments. Amazon Prime Video competes in the same segment as does iTunes and offers similar prices for movie and TV rental. Amazon Prime is winning here because Prime offers BOTH the Netflix/Hulu model and the iTunes model. Pay the Prime subscription, you get all the basic content like the former. Pay to rent/buy you get the other content like iTunes. The difference between Amazon Prime and Netflix/Hulu is that paying for Amazon Prime also gets you free shipping on their shopping site, book deals etc. For people who already owned Kindles and were regular Amazon Prime shoppers, the Netflix/Hulu movie tier is free. And it is easier/more convenient to access the rented/bought content through Amazon Prime via your Roku or smart TV app than it is on iTunes, which you can only access either via your PC or on Apple TV. And where iTunes content can only be viewed on a single device, content bought or rented via Amazon Prime can be viewed on any device ... your Mac, iPad, Roku, smart TV and also via your web browser. Amazon Prime also offers an easy, convenient way to access HBO and other pay cable channels for cord cutters as well as a ton of exclusive content that isn't available anywhere else. Meanwhile iTunes does neither.
And this has nothing to do with whining about "look down from the 10000' height." You are only spewing that nonsense in order to evade the actual issue of the WSJ column. Which is that Apple is losing market share to Amazon Prime because Amazon offers a better service for people who are already Prime members than Apple does through iTunes. The reason is that Amazon Prime Video is a service that launched like 10 years ago and Amazon has continuously updated and improved it. I was an early adopter to Amazon Prime and it was brutal ... back then all you could do was download videos to a PC and view it with Windows Media Player, VLC or something like that. Making it essentially an inferior iTunes competitor, similar to what Amazon Music was back then. But Amazon built on that to make it pretty much the best streaming video service out there because you can get both the subscription content that Hulu and Netflix offers AND the rental/purchase options that iTunes, Vudu, Fandango and Google Play offers. And again, Prime, Vudu, Fandango and Google Play all offer primarily web-based clients, not resource-heavy desktop applications that was designed back in the mid-90s to download files over 2600 baud modem connections and hasn't had its core technology meaningfully updated since then like iTunes. Yes, I know that iTunes on iPad and iPhones are better solutions, but the Prime Video app is on those too (and works as good or better). The point is that the Prime solution is clearly better on everything BUT the iPad and iPhone, which for most people is their third option for watching movies after the TV and PC, especially if you are not one of the tiny percentage of the population that actually owns an Apple TV instead of a smart TV.
Bottom line: when you add the subscriptions to the rental/sales fees as well as the premium channel add-ons, Amazon is making more than Apple is with iTunes on movies and TV shows. But hey, Apple is making more on iPhones and iPads than Amazon is on Fire TV boxes, Kindles and Prime phones, right? That is the only comparison that you want to make, right? Because that is the only one that is favorable to you. Well, how about we compare the money that Apple is making on iCloud subscriptions versus how much Amazon is making on AWS? But I bet you think that enterprise AWS is a "commodity segment" right?
Not surprising at all. AppleTV has become an utterly dated, mediocre product -- I barely use it anymore, except to listen to my music on the cloud. Our cable provider, Comcast, has really upped its game. I can watch pretty much anything I need -- movies, TV shows -- on any of my devices, not to mention my TV. Often I check for shows on Comcast first, since it searches across every content provider and tells me when stuff is free on HBO, Showtime, Netflix, Starz, etc., stuff that Apple would charge me for; i.e., it does a good-enough 'universal' search.
Apple has essentially surrendered the TV/movie game to its competitors. When Cook makes a statement like 'AppleTV is the future of television,' it sounds laughable, actually. I can't believe he can say that with a straight face. Eddy Cue has been been pathetic in his role, and has not served Apple well. It's amazing that's he's still around.
Not exactly true. I can't watch Comcast shows from another house using Comcast unless they have a TV plan that includes the shows I want to watch on an iOS device or Mac. Comcast also continues to use stupid Flash when trying to access xfinity.tv on my new Mac. Yes, Comcast offers X1 and pushes everything they own but I'd really like to get rid of them. It's difficult for Apple to break into this business when companies like Comcast own the pipe, broadcast and movie companies (NBC Universal).
I always buy on iTunes because, usually, the iTunes Extras usually provide a decent set of extra features - usually mimicking the physical disc release. The number of audio commentaries being included, for example, has been a great reason to buy. No other service does this (to my knowledge). Plus the generous device allowance of iTunes allows me to download the content across multiple devices.
I mostly rent on Amazon Prime Video because there are usually offers and discounts that make the cost of renting much more reasonable. But I don't really trust Amazon sufficiently to buy non-physical movies from them. Having just seen the BBC Store close down after a year, it makes me very nervous for streaming only services like this. But at least the BBC refunded the full cost of everything that I bought from them plus, ironically, giving me a £20 voucher for Amazon (which I used to rent stuff).
VUDU does the same thing with the extras. I buy all my movies digitally through Vudu as I can stream them on anything I have, Smart TV, Xbox, Roku, Chromcast, iPhone, iPad and still get all the extras.
In addition, if your rental service is Ultraviolet-compatible, which includes Vudu but also Flixster, you can download your movies just as you can with iTunes. The only difference is that it is encoded in the proprietary Ultraviolet format.
To be fair, Amazon used to offer iTunes-like downloads in widely used formats - *.wmv on Windows PCs and I believe that you could choose others - that could be viewed through their own player. They stopped doing so, not by their own doing, but rather because the studios wanted extra protections from piracy. Later to compete with Google Play, who started offering downloads for offline view
But then again, you can't view iTunes rented or purchased content outside of iTunes either. So it is a wash. Well no, it isn't because iTunes only allows you to view rentals on one device where Flixster, Vudu, Amazon, Google, Netflix etc. do not. Apple just fell behind here, and there is no good way to catch up. Apple TV is never going to be anything more than niche purchases, and the same with streaming boxes in general (Roku, Fire TV et al) because most people have smart TVs. And the only way to compete with Amazon and the others without being tied to Apple hardware is to develop the backend cloud/web services that Apple does not have and does not have the expertise to develop, and also to throw out the existing iTunes on all platforms (macOS, iOS, tvOS, Windows) and rewrite it from scratch, then migrate the legacy iTunes functionality to the new cloud/web-based iTunes. That would be an 18 month undertaking even if Apple was good in this area. Remember: Apple bought existing services to build out into Apple Music and Apple Maps, and it still took 2 years for the former and 3 years for the latter to get them to quality/feature parity with the competition. But I don't know if there is anything that Apple could buy to be the basis of a new Prime competitor. Redbox had a streaming service, but they shut it down. The other services see themselves as huge Apple competitors or have big backers (i.e. several studios essentially created and own the Ultraviolet standard behind Flixster, Vudu is co-owned by Wal-Mart in addition to being an Ultraviolet member, the same is true of the video sales/rental app via Target) so Apple really would have to build this from scratch, hopefully by paying to dollar to lure the best engineers from the competing services to build this for them. Basically if Apple is going to modernize and compete in this arena it will be a lengthy and expensive process for an organization that is primarily a hardware company and not a web/cloud company to begin with. It is a totally different challenge from, say, Apple Music, because HD video files consume far more bandwidth than the audio files that Apple Music deals with.
I won't buy online movies: You either have to download and save them and then keep track of them on your own harddrives -- or lock yourself into a particular vendor's cloud service. No thanks. DVDs are cheaper, easier to store and last longer....
Renting is better -- but overly expensive.... It's really only viable for special movies that you have a particular urge to watch.
I understand what you mean about DVDs being cheaper and can be better quality (Blu-Ray), but there are some benefits to online purchases as well: - Download to iPhone / iPad for watching on the go, to multiple devices. Much simpler (and better quality) than ripping from DVD - If you are someone within Apple's ecosystem, then it isn't much of a lock. - As for last longer, that is debatable. With multiple family members (especially kids), I have had a number of DVD's "go missing", which doesn't happen with iTunes purchases.
We only purchase movies that we expect to watch multiple times (kids movies are prime example), that would be used on mobile devices, etc.
Where I live iTunes rental prices are slightly cheaper (or at best equal) to the offerings from the PayTV companies. I don't know about Amazon. This is an area that hasn't moved in a decade, and that is not just Apple. I also suspect that content owners will strike better deals with competitors over Apple...
I do agree that iTunes is stale - lots of things that Apple could try (or at least, could try to work with Hollywood on) in just the rental/purchase space (not needing to get into the streaming game and compete with Netflix).
what is baked into the Amazon 20% market share? are they just including total prime memberships bc that includes Amazon Video...i highly doubt individual sales/rentals of movies on Amazon give it a 20% share....by this logic, if apple released a few movies/shows on Apple Music, are they now including total Apple Music Subscribers...?
I don't see any reason at all to doubt Amazon has at least a 20% share of the video streaming business. With millions of Amazon Prime members who get to watch a broad swath of their catalog for no additional charge after the annual membership fee, reasonable (in general) rental fees for the movies that aren't Prime-eligible, and Amazon Video being available on a multitude of platforms, smart tv's and services from Roku to TIVO they have a huge presence.
That was the point of his question though. The market in question is the video/move "rental and purchase" market. Is the Amazon 20% explicitly this (what is paid extra for, above the Prime membership) - or does it include Prime streaming? Apple doesn't compete in the latter.
I've never gotten rentals to work with iTunes. When I decide to rent a movie and watch it immediately, I get a message saying that it will be ready in half an hour. Depending on the connection, that stretches to an hour or so.
When the movie starts streaming, good luck trying to go back a couple of minutes. It just stutters and the entire "please wait" game starts again.
It could easily be a slow internet connection, but I've never had these problems with Netflix. Netflix streams movies and shows on the same spotty internet connection that Apple just can't seem to handle.
What makes it more of a head-scratcher is that Apple Events stream without issues on the same connection.
I've lost money on a couple of rentals on iTunes as it was just too frustrating to sit through the process.
I don't purchase any English movies on iTunes because I get buy the washed down, censored version of the movie. I buy the Blu-rays from Amazon instead.
Sounds like your internet sucks.
There is no inherent explanation in the rentals system for any of that behavior. That isn't how it is at all for anyone else.
I always buy on iTunes because, usually, the iTunes Extras usually provide a decent set of extra features - usually mimicking the physical disc release. The number of audio commentaries being included, for example, has been a great reason to buy. No other service does this (to my knowledge). Plus the generous device allowance of iTunes allows me to download the content across multiple devices.
I mostly rent on Amazon Prime Video because there are usually offers and discounts that make the cost of renting much more reasonable. But I don't really trust Amazon sufficiently to buy non-physical movies from them. Having just seen the BBC Store close down after a year, it makes me very nervous for streaming only services like this. But at least the BBC refunded the full cost of everything that I bought from them plus, ironically, giving me a £20 voucher for Amazon (which I used to rent stuff).
I almost never buy on iTunes because $14.99-$19.99 is a rip off for one 1 movie. Netflix and Hulu have redefined the value of a single piece of content when it costs less than that for a month of access to million of titles.
Instead I rent from iTunes at $3.99 - $5.99 and use NoteBurner to encode a copy to keep. That is fair price to pay to own. If they lowered their prices, I wouldn't have to use DRM removal tools anymore.
Or, if they finally caught up to the 21st century and offered an Apple Video subscription.
I have purchased a few movies from iTunes but how long do I actually get to watch them if Apple decides to exit the business some day. Also, I lose access to those movies if I switch platforms. The movies only play on Apple devices. On the other hand I subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime and find those services really no better. The movies they offer for streaming are old, badly reviewed knockoffs of more famous movies in their genre. I find that I rent more movies than I stream because of quality. iTunes rental prices are in line with Amazon Prime ($4.99 - $5.99).
I always buy on iTunes because, usually, the iTunes Extras usually provide a decent set of extra features - usually mimicking the physical disc release. The number of audio commentaries being included, for example, has been a great reason to buy. No other service does this (to my knowledge). Plus the generous device allowance of iTunes allows me to download the content across multiple devices.
I mostly rent on Amazon Prime Video because there are usually offers and discounts that make the cost of renting much more reasonable. But I don't really trust Amazon sufficiently to buy non-physical movies from them. Having just seen the BBC Store close down after a year, it makes me very nervous for streaming only services like this. But at least the BBC refunded the full cost of everything that I bought from them plus, ironically, giving me a £20 voucher for Amazon (which I used to rent stuff).
I almost never buy on iTunes because $14.99-$19.99 is a rip off for one 1 movie. Netflix and Hulu have redefined the value of a single piece of content when it costs less than that for a month of access to million of titles.
Instead I rent from iTunes at $3.99 - $5.99 and use NoteBurner to encode a copy to keep. That is fair price to pay to own. If they lowered their prices, I wouldn't have to use DRM removal tools anymore.
Or, if they finally caught up to the 21st century and offered an Apple Video subscription.
In other words, you justify your theft by saying their movies are too expensive, instead of just admitting you're a cheapskate.
I'm a cheapskate and I know it. That's why I wait until something is cheap or free before I watch it.
iTunes is still noticeably more expensive than all competition and without promotions which indicates Apple is not sweating this.
By the way are people still downloading movies illegally from torrent sites and what have you? I thought that was a thing of the past? I don’t know of anyone who does that at the monent... why would you want to sacrifice the HD quality for a few dollars?
I buy music digitally and rent movies mostly from Amazon because they make it so easy to watch my purchases almost anywhere. I've got an XBox One, a PC, an iPhone, an iPad, and a Nexus 7. I can watch on any of them..
Also, I subscribe to iTunes match so any music purchases I make through Amazon are automatically matched on my PC and are available to listen to on my iPhone.
For music streaming I use Groove by Microsoft. They also have apps that work on all my devices.
Apple has good services, but they are simply more limiting than other options if you use devices outside the Apple ecosystem.
Just because you continue to pay Comcast prices doesn't mean the ATV has somehow become dated and mediocre ? That's nonsense. That may be your usage scenerio, but that doesn't apply to everyone or the product in it's entirety.
Lack of 4K support when your competition has it for almost a year now does mean "ATV has somehow become dated and mediocre", though.
Let's get some facts around 4K and how many shows are watched...I love 4k but the limited content makes it a non issue for Apple TV. Yes I want everything in 4k but it really does not matter that others have it. I can go buy those offerings and will still be watching 99% of content in HD.
what is baked into the Amazon 20% market share? are they just including total prime memberships bc that includes Amazon Video...i highly doubt individual sales/rentals of movies on Amazon give it a 20% share....by this logic, if apple released a few movies/shows on Apple Music, are they now including total Apple Music Subscribers...?
I don't see any reason at all to doubt Amazon has at least a 20% share of the video streaming business. With millions of Amazon Prime members who get to watch a broad swath of their catalog for no additional charge after the annual membership fee, reasonable (in general) rental fees for the movies that aren't Prime-eligible, and Amazon Video being available on a multitude of platforms, smart tv's and services from Roku to TIVO they have a huge presence.
That was the point of his question though. The market in question is the video/move "rental and purchase" market. Is the Amazon 20% explicitly this (what is paid extra for, above the Prime membership) - or does it include Prime streaming? Apple doesn't compete in the latter.
No, he asked if they were just counting total Prime memberships whether they used Amazon Video or not. I don't at all doubt actual users of the service plus those who rent per title but not having a Prime membership would account for 20% market share.
I've never gotten rentals to work with iTunes. When I decide to rent a movie and watch it immediately, I get a message saying that it will be ready in half an hour. Depending on the connection, that stretches to an hour or so.
When the movie starts streaming, good luck trying to go back a couple of minutes. It just stutters and the entire "please wait" game starts again.
It could easily be a slow internet connection, but I've never had these problems with Netflix. Netflix streams movies and shows on the same spotty internet connection that Apple just can't seem to handle.
That’s definitely your connection. I have fast internet and zero problems streaming itunes content, rewinding, etc.
As for Netflix, my understanding is their app streams while the itunes app downloads.
Comments
And this has nothing to do with whining about "look down from the 10000' height." You are only spewing that nonsense in order to evade the actual issue of the WSJ column. Which is that Apple is losing market share to Amazon Prime because Amazon offers a better service for people who are already Prime members than Apple does through iTunes. The reason is that Amazon Prime Video is a service that launched like 10 years ago and Amazon has continuously updated and improved it. I was an early adopter to Amazon Prime and it was brutal ... back then all you could do was download videos to a PC and view it with Windows Media Player, VLC or something like that. Making it essentially an inferior iTunes competitor, similar to what Amazon Music was back then. But Amazon built on that to make it pretty much the best streaming video service out there because you can get both the subscription content that Hulu and Netflix offers AND the rental/purchase options that iTunes, Vudu, Fandango and Google Play offers. And again, Prime, Vudu, Fandango and Google Play all offer primarily web-based clients, not resource-heavy desktop applications that was designed back in the mid-90s to download files over 2600 baud modem connections and hasn't had its core technology meaningfully updated since then like iTunes. Yes, I know that iTunes on iPad and iPhones are better solutions, but the Prime Video app is on those too (and works as good or better). The point is that the Prime solution is clearly better on everything BUT the iPad and iPhone, which for most people is their third option for watching movies after the TV and PC, especially if you are not one of the tiny percentage of the population that actually owns an Apple TV instead of a smart TV.
Bottom line: when you add the subscriptions to the rental/sales fees as well as the premium channel add-ons, Amazon is making more than Apple is with iTunes on movies and TV shows. But hey, Apple is making more on iPhones and iPads than Amazon is on Fire TV boxes, Kindles and Prime phones, right? That is the only comparison that you want to make, right? Because that is the only one that is favorable to you. Well, how about we compare the money that Apple is making on iCloud subscriptions versus how much Amazon is making on AWS? But I bet you think that enterprise AWS is a "commodity segment" right?
I used to go to the theater, but never do anymore, mainly b/c people eat their popcorn like donkeys.
I used to rent from Redbox, but it's too inconvenient to return the next day.
I never buy physical media anymore.
I don't like AppleMusic
I've had an AppleTV since the original and rent/buy movies on iTunes but I'm doing less and less b/c it's too expensive.
I occasionally watch a movie on HBO or Netflix.
I watch Fareed Zakaria's GPS, a few series on HBO like Veep, Bill Maher, Silicon Valley, This Week Tonight and that's about it.
To be fair, Amazon used to offer iTunes-like downloads in widely used formats - *.wmv on Windows PCs and I believe that you could choose others - that could be viewed through their own player. They stopped doing so, not by their own doing, but rather because the studios wanted extra protections from piracy. Later to compete with Google Play, who started offering downloads for offline view
But then again, you can't view iTunes rented or purchased content outside of iTunes either. So it is a wash. Well no, it isn't because iTunes only allows you to view rentals on one device where Flixster, Vudu, Amazon, Google, Netflix etc. do not. Apple just fell behind here, and there is no good way to catch up. Apple TV is never going to be anything more than niche purchases, and the same with streaming boxes in general (Roku, Fire TV et al) because most people have smart TVs. And the only way to compete with Amazon and the others without being tied to Apple hardware is to develop the backend cloud/web services that Apple does not have and does not have the expertise to develop, and also to throw out the existing iTunes on all platforms (macOS, iOS, tvOS, Windows) and rewrite it from scratch, then migrate the legacy iTunes functionality to the new cloud/web-based iTunes. That would be an 18 month undertaking even if Apple was good in this area. Remember: Apple bought existing services to build out into Apple Music and Apple Maps, and it still took 2 years for the former and 3 years for the latter to get them to quality/feature parity with the competition. But I don't know if there is anything that Apple could buy to be the basis of a new Prime competitor. Redbox had a streaming service, but they shut it down. The other services see themselves as huge Apple competitors or have big backers (i.e. several studios essentially created and own the Ultraviolet standard behind Flixster, Vudu is co-owned by Wal-Mart in addition to being an Ultraviolet member, the same is true of the video sales/rental app via Target) so Apple really would have to build this from scratch, hopefully by paying to dollar to lure the best engineers from the competing services to build this for them. Basically if Apple is going to modernize and compete in this arena it will be a lengthy and expensive process for an organization that is primarily a hardware company and not a web/cloud company to begin with. It is a totally different challenge from, say, Apple Music, because HD video files consume far more bandwidth than the audio files that Apple Music deals with.
- Download to iPhone / iPad for watching on the go, to multiple devices. Much simpler (and better quality) than ripping from DVD
- If you are someone within Apple's ecosystem, then it isn't much of a lock.
- As for last longer, that is debatable. With multiple family members (especially kids), I have had a number of DVD's "go missing", which doesn't happen with iTunes purchases.
We only purchase movies that we expect to watch multiple times (kids movies are prime example), that would be used on mobile devices, etc.
Where I live iTunes rental prices are slightly cheaper (or at best equal) to the offerings from the PayTV companies. I don't know about Amazon. This is an area that hasn't moved in a decade, and that is not just Apple. I also suspect that content owners will strike better deals with competitors over Apple...
I do agree that iTunes is stale - lots of things that Apple could try (or at least, could try to work with Hollywood on) in just the rental/purchase space (not needing to get into the streaming game and compete with Netflix).
There is no inherent explanation in the rentals system for any of that behavior. That isn't how it is at all for anyone else.
I almost never buy on iTunes because $14.99-$19.99 is a rip off for one 1 movie. Netflix and Hulu have redefined the value of a single piece of content when it costs less than that for a month of access to million of titles.
Instead I rent from iTunes at $3.99 - $5.99 and use NoteBurner to encode a copy to keep. That is fair price to pay to own. If they lowered their prices, I wouldn't have to use DRM removal tools anymore.
Or, if they finally caught up to the 21st century and offered an Apple Video subscription.
I'm a cheapskate and I know it. That's why I wait until something is cheap or free before I watch it.
By the way are people still downloading movies illegally from torrent sites and what have you? I thought that was a thing of the past? I don’t know of anyone who does that at the monent... why would you want to sacrifice the HD quality for a few dollars?
Also, I subscribe to iTunes match so any music purchases I make through Amazon are automatically matched on my PC and are available to listen to on my iPhone.
For music streaming I use Groove by Microsoft. They also have apps that work on all my devices.
Apple has good services, but they are simply more limiting than other options if you use devices outside the Apple ecosystem.
As for Netflix, my understanding is their app streams while the itunes app downloads.