‘I Finally Cracked It’

Marco Arment on the passage in Isaacson’s biography where Jobs tells him he’s “cracked” the problem of creating an Apple-quality TV.

The way to revolutionize the TV market is to cut out all of the legacy. No cable companies. No broadcast tuners. No channels. No DVRs. All internet delivery. All on-demand. No commercials.

But that’s an incredibly tall order. Apple can do a lot, but I’m not sure that they can do that, given how much of it is out of their control.

It’s all about content. I don’t even think it’s that hard to imagine a truly game-changing TV from Apple — but such a thing would require massive participation from content providers. I’m not going to hold my breath.

The other thing that’s always struck me is that even if Apple could get a ton of content providers on board with the idea, they’d still have to worry about cable providers because so many of us get our Internet service from a cable company. What’s to stop Comcast from throttling your bandwidth after you drop TV service and pay them for nothing other than Internet service? Ideally the feds would prevent that, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that either.

★ Monday, 24 October 2011