Customer Disservice

Late Apple CEO and frontman Steve Jobs earned legendary status when it came to making people want to buy products. But in contrast to the florid and grandiose language used to describe new iPhones, tablets, computers, and more, Jobs is on the record describing Apple TV as little more than a “hobby” of the company with no market.

Fast forward to 2017, when cord-cutting is rampant and media streaming devices are selling like hot cakes, you’d think the humble Apple TV would be celebrated as a product ahead of the times and in perfect position to capitalize on the trends.

Instead, it’s being lampooned for its failure to do so:

While the financial writers seem somewhat baffled that Apple has let this opportunity slip away from them, despite their early interest, Dixon nails the problem:

[Apple’s] video strategy is centered around cementing the Apple ecosystem in its customers lives, not creating market leading video services.

In other words, if what you want to watch doesn’t help Apple’s bottom line, don’t expect their products to be very helpful.

For consumers frustrated by too many TV apps and a jungle of cords and devices beneath their sets, Apple TV is an also-ran device that doesn’t address the their pain points with cable TV or other streaming devices.

Would You Like Ads with That?

Despite a different strategy in their approach to TV, Facebook suffers from what is esentially the same problem.

Their sudden interest in TV has everything to do with pushing users towards their own platform, from which they make money.

I, for one, am remind of Facebook’s launch of “Home”, an Android launcher that was widely seen as a half-baked digital land-grab, turning your smartphone home screen into prime real estate for ads.

It didn’t go well.

A Facebook app for your TV or set top box would serve the same purpose. Even if it comes with some exclusive content in tow, the ultimate strategy revolves around getting more ads in front of more eyeballs.

Winging It

Twitter is a curious case, from the TV perspective. The company is desperate revenue, and in media, they see a trillion-dollar indutsry being turned on its ear by technology. Like everyone else, they’d love a shot at a piece of it.

But for a company often described as on the verge of acquisition or financial meltdown, partnering with the NFL seemed a strange path to take. Sports broadcast fees are notoriously expensive, accounting for approximately of 40% programming costs to TV providers.

While Twitter surely pays an arm and a leg for those rights, the games were streamed for free.

It would seem that one thing Twitter has in common with the titans of the media industry is desperation; a need to do something big, regardless of what that is.

It’s a bit funny to see, because FreeCast offers a much easier way to make money from the current disruptive trends in the media industry than Twitter’s NFL Hail Mary. In fact, Twitter itself could take advantage of it tomorrow.

The Silver Bullet

FreeCast’s service is made available as a licensed co-brand or as a white label service, allowing organizations of all kinds, even beyond the traditional media industry, to monetize the trends in the television industry.

Without paying FreeCast a dime, Twitter, Facebook, or Apple could each deploy a branded version of FreeCast’s guide, which retails for $3.99 a month.

Earning $0.75 per month for each user, if even one percent of these companies 100 million+ users signed up, that would be over $9 million dollars in revenue a year. Near effortlessly.

And that’s from subscriptions alone. Add in pay-per-view and subscription commissions, ad revenues, and more, and that number only increases.

A new revenue stream of that size, at the smallest, would quiet a lot of the investor hand-wringing at Twitter, and could even move the needle at already mega-profitable companies like Apple.