With so many professional and armchair analysts sure that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) will not disrupt Netflix (NFLX) with an iCloud streaming implementation of Apple TV, it’s fair to note they’ve made several good points.
Apple (AAPL) still has many good reasons to embrace it as part of a content streaming model as the service has already made strides in partnership with Disney to start in 2016. Netflix also already has a devoted customer base that cares enough about its product to be outraged when any part of it is rebranded and tossed aside as though it were an awkward evolutionary step toward the content streaming process we’ve all come to know and love.
But what they’re forgetting, and what analyst Rich Tullo is seeing are ways an iCloud streaming model could best Netflix in underserved areas of the technology. Here are several ways in which it could reign supreme:
It Could Strike a Deal with the Big Guns
Before major production houses and broadcasters started pulling out of the Hulu Plus like it was yesterday’s news, many users saw it as an answer to a Netflix lack of current content. Netflix is a fine product if a user wants to stream an entire season of a television show, or watch a movie that would be slow to release to live broadcast audiences—but the service doesn’t handle distribution of content from a current season whatsoever. If Apple (AAPL) can pull an iTunes miracle and get ailing cable networks and indie production houses on board, there could be a visual content revolution that will pigeonhole Netflix to its well-established movie and last season’s content niche. Hollywood’s been holding out for the right deal on streaming technology, Apple might be strong enough to provide it.
It Could Provide Best Quality
What many of the sticklers who still insist on buying Blu-Ray still insist is that streaming technologies and speeds have not yet caught up with the quality levels they expect to see when they sit down to enjoy visual programming. And on this they’re right though Netflix has taken great pains in the past year to revamp the process to become more seamless for the end user. They’ve done a great job at getting autoplay features and better buffering—but that can’t compete with seamless streaming viewed on a settop model that has a large panel retina display. And if we know one thing about Apple (AAPL), it’s that they company generally tends to underpromise and overdeliver, whether it’s in the financial end of the business or the consumer end of product adoption.
It Could Always Offer to Buy
Sure. It’s a long shot, and it’s an even longer shot now than it was when people were talking about it the first time back in 2010, but Apple (AAPL) without Jobs could always decide to change strategies and just suffer the pain of spending more money than it usually does to make money. The move would make absolutely no strategic sense at this point—but since Apple’s keeping mum on what it plans to do about its visual content sector, we can only speculate—and when guessing, anything’s game.
