| Apple's Fire-Sale TV Rentals: Not a Game Changer |
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| Sunday, 10 August 2008 17:30 |
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For television networks and cable broadcasters, Apple's new 99-cent TV rentals represent neither an existential threat to the industry nor the future of the medium.
Much is being made of Apple's announcement that it will offer first run shows from ABC and Fox for rental the day after they air for less than a dollar. The reality, however, is that despite the highly publicized launch, analysts say the new iTunes offering will not jeopardize television's status quo -- a multi-pronged source of revenue that now combines advertising dollars, syndication deals and retransmission fees. “The upside with 99-cent rental is significantly smaller than the downside,” Arash Amel, a digital media analyst at Screen Digest, told TheWrap. “For more networks to get involved they’d essentially be emphasizing a deal that gives them millions of dollars on the digital side while risking the billions of dollars they get in carriage deals and retransmission.” Indeed, last year, a total of $1 billion was spent on all online downloads, a figure that’s expected to rise to $3.6 billion by 2014. That’s big money, but it’s nothing compared to the billions networks routinely bring in from their retransmission deals and ad sales. Those could potentially be endangered should cable networks get angry over the fact that networks are casting their lot with online video, which is widely believed to be cannibalizing the pay TV business. By Brent Lang Published: September 01, 2010 @ 6:18 pm Read more at The Wrap |
| Last Updated on Friday, 03 September 2010 15:17 |
