Apple touts Itunes TV to broadcasters

APPLE IS REPORTED to be doing the rounds of America's biggest broadcasting companies in an effort to secure deals on programming for a new Itunes-based TV subscription service.

The $30 monthly service is, according to multiple sources including the Fox Network, not currently tied to a specific piece of hardware. Which probably means that it will not work exclusively on Apple's interesting but underwhelming Apple TV hardware. As such, the service will almost certainly not be a live streaming operation.

Expanding the video side of Itunes is a smart move on Apple's part, if you take into account that it has the credit card details of more than 100 million paying customers. Converting just ten per cent of those music fans into TV subscribers for a year would bag Apple and its potential network partners a staggering $3.6 billion.

Television networks are all too aware that the vast ocean of advertising cash is not only shrinking alarmingly, but is also starting to flow inexorably away from traditional media like broadcast TV and print, and into the Internet.

It's not enough to secure a frighteningly expensive one-minute ad spot for your tooth-rotting sugary fizz-water on Superbowl Sunday any more. You also have to get some very lucrative product placement into the latest console-based sports sim, and a slightly risqué viral video onto Youtube to get anywhere these days.

Apple is, of course, no stranger to creating successful distribution models for other people's media. Itunes has become synonymous with the legal downloading of digital music since it launched way back in 2001, and has earned Apple and its record company partners huge amounts of cash.

The biggest stumbling block for Apple will be persuading the first big network to take the plunge. TV execs are not well known for their imagination when it comes to making business decisions (or for the most part making programmes for that matter) but Apple's long-standing relationship with Disney alongside the fact that Mickey and his minions are already exploring ways to make more money out of digital delivery, could come into play here.

You never know, but if Apple pulls this complex deal off in the same way it did with practically all of the world's biggest record companies, and secures at least 50 per cent of the big buck broadcasts (think Lost, House, Heroes, Flash Forward, the Simpsons and all of those homogenous 'talent' and 'reality' shows that the great unwashed find impossible to miss), it could even turn Apple TV from the slightly embarrassing also-ran it currently is into a must-have media player.

Well, maybe that's going overboard, but you catch our general drift.

But it won't be enough to work on Apple TV alone. In order for any kind of open-ended TV subscription model to really work, it will have to work on every device on the planet capable of playing video.

Apple Network TV on the Zune HD anyone? µ