A report that Apple has discussed the prospect of building...
A report that Apple has discussed the prospect of building a cable set-top box with cable operators including Time Warner Cable sparked a wave of Wall Street commentary. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that such talks took place this…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
summer. A spokesman for Time Warner Cable declined to comment. That didn’t stop stock analysts from making the case for and against Apple’s entry into the cable set-top box business, which is largely dominated by Motorola and Cisco. For cable operators, letting Apple take control of the user-interface could reverse the industry’s declining share of the pay-TV market, BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield wrote (http://xrl.us/bnkzc8). Consumers typically love Apple products but complain about their pay-TV provider, he said. Regulatory uncertainty could slow progress toward an Apple-cable box, he said. In light of the attention Comcast received for the way it handles Xfinity TV traffic to its subscribers Xbox’s, the cable industry and Apple probably won’t proceed along those lines “until they are near-certain that the managed service exception [to the FCC’s net neutrality principles] is legal,” he said. “It remains unclear how soon there will be definitive clear around managed services and net neutrality, especially heading into a Presidential election,” he said. “Caveat emptor”, Sanford Bernstein analysts warned in a note that discussed the implications of an Apple cable box for cable operators, content owners, Google, Amazon, Netflix and Apple itself. In giving up control of the user-interface “they would be opening the door to a Trojan Horse strategy where Apple would increasingly usurp the customer relationship,” they said. “Apple could later use that customer relationship as a way to upend the economic sharing model of any initial agreement, precisely as they have done in wireless.” Credit Suisse analyst Stefan Anninger also warned cable operators should proceed with caution.