Mark my words: cable TV is going away. You heard it here first. It’s dying, it’s a dinosaur, it will exist only in fossil records. I’m not talking about ESPN or HBO or other channels, I’m talking about the idea of running a cable into your house from a telephone pole in order to watch stuff. The future is going to be just sucking it out of the sky and getting it by internet.
The New York Post (?!) is reporting that Apple is hard at work on a new video streaming service that would provide cable channels over the Internet and looking to launch it later this year. The Post says Apple is taking the same negotiating tactic with cable channels as it took with record labels and iTunes, namely, no negotiations, we tell you the price and you take it. That worked pretty well many years ago for Apple and Apple is now much bigger and stronger.
This is really the second shoe to drop on streaming cable (or whatever we wish to call it). Last week, Google applied for a license to start doing the same thing as a test run in Kansas City.
We’ve known for a while now that the race was on for a smart TV that works like a computer, both Google and Apple are working on it. Now it appears there’s a race for a whole new way of getting channels. If they make this work a la carte and I can get JUST Comedy Central and History Channel, then technology itself will be a success.
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