You need a whole new ecosystem if you’re going to dislodge cable. Cable controls the whole stack, as people in IT like to say. From the content owners, which are addicted to the huge licensing fees only cable can afford to pay; to the distribution networks; to the consumer devices; to the eyeballs; to the advertisers: Cable owns the stack.

If you want to beat cable, you need to create a whole new ecosystem for reaching consumers and changing their habits. Has Apple done that? I think so.

In the Apple TV ecosystem, the phone is not just an iOS controller, it is the hub of a new personal mobile media center. Don’t get distracted by Apple’s video rental service. It sucks, for now, and won’t get people to cut the cable. But they will buy the Apple TV box, because it is cheap and they have iPhones and iPods and iPads, and they see the inexorable logic of closing the loop between their Macs and their phones and their mobile media devices and their TVs.

This loop will make it really easy for people to start consuming new kinds of content on their TVs. I bet they’ll start to use it. A lot. This is what is disruptive about the new Apple TV, not the $99 price or the rental service. Apple TV is a paradigm shift, because you always have your phone but no one lets you integrate your phone into the media center.

Guess what? Apple just did that.

People generally only think about the network/lock-in effect of Apple’s devices/services when they’re thinking about how dangerous it is. But just like with Microsoft, it’s dangerous because it works. It works really, really well.

(Thanks to Tim Carmody, Gadget Lab’s newest addition, for that last graf!)

See Also:

• Hands On With the New $100 Apple TV
• Apple Takes Aim at Cable With Tiny New Apple TV
• Why iOS Could Make Apple TV a Hit
• Goodbye TV, Hello Broadband
• Apple Goes Where the Portals Failed…It’s the Hardware Stupid

Authors: Evan Hansen

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