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Can Playstation Vue be Apple's acquisition target as apple enters streaming TV services?
Sony is said to have hired bank of america merrill lynch for sale. Launched in 2015, Playstation Vue is the first pay-per-view live streaming service, with more channels than Sling TV and a cloud-based DVR live broadcast service, offering bundled packages of different TV stations for an initial price of $49.99 per month. But Sony's promotion strategy has been unsatisfactory, eventually leading to the exhaustion of advantages, difficult to occupy more markets.
Playstation Vue has about 500000 subscribers, but is currently facing losses, dwarfing the millions who subscribe to Hulu, YouTube TV and sling TV.
Although it is quite small, people who use Playstation Vue still like it, which has a 4.5 star rating on iOS and has been named one of the top five most popular streaming television platforms in the United States.
It has a certain value for apple, which is opening the streaming TV market. Providing the built-in live TV streaming is certainly a good way for apple to enhance the Apple TV experience. Although third-party streaming services such as at & T TV can be integrated with tvos, it is more convenient and user-friendly to watch live TV directly in TV applications.
In addition, Apple could theoretically combine the Apple TV with live television services and provide additional services including Apple TV channels, Apple music and iCloud storage.
Of course, apple doesn't need to acquire Playstation Vue to add real-time TV to Apple TV. It can solve these problems internally, but the acquisition can speed up the process. In the process of establishing its own subscription service for live streaming TV, Apple has also experienced many hardships, and knows that direct acquisition is the most labor-saving way.
Apple has long been in talks with cable companies to open a $30-a-month television channel package. In the end, the two sides did not agree on the issue of price and license. Eddie Ku (Eddy Cue), Apple's representative in the negotiations, said it was almost impossible for cable companies to give in on prices.
With the expansion of the real-time streaming TV market, online platforms are making money through this service, while cable TV companies are reluctant to give up their own interests, forming a complex pull situation. And one of the reasons that the major media are focused on Apple's actions is that they are worried that the terms set by Apple will be adopted by cable distributors, thus reducing the price of the whole industry.
We don't know if Apple is interested in entering the live television industry. If Apple decides to do it, it will be a good complement to the Apple TV and another way to increase service revenue.
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