To understand the plight of Apple TV, it would be much better to use Roku Express (a set-top box) as a reference.
Compared to Apple TV, Roku’s $30 streaming TV device is nothing more than ordinary. When browsing menus and applications, it can only slowly and intermittently move. Its single-band wireless connection has a generation's history. The remote controller uses a bulky infrared technology. Considering that Roku's Streaming Stick products only cost $20 more to eliminate these issues, it's hard to imagine how many people will switch to buying their products.
Moreover, Roku did not have any sales difficulties on its cheapest streaming media device. In a recently submitted IPO document, Roku said that device sales in the first half of the year increased by 37% year-on-year. According to market research firm NPD Group, Roku sells equipment in the U.S. market, which accounts for more than two-thirds of the US$50 or less. In the United States, Roku’s average selling price has dropped to $47.
Currently, Apple TV is priced at $150, which is more than three times the average price of Roku. However, although Apple's streaming media set-top box is ahead of Roku Express in terms of performance and polishing, the experience is not much different when playing video in applications like Netflix. This may explain why Apple TV's market share is being eroded by Amazon and Roku. People basically do not have much motivation to spend more money on streaming media boxes.
At the press conference on September 12, Apple released 4K HDR Apple TV, which will help Apple resolve compatibility issues with competitors' streaming media set-top boxes. However, it is difficult to tell the truth that this new model will promote the recovery of market share. According to market research firm NPD, for Roku, set-top boxes above $75, including Premiere+ and Ultra 4K HDR players, accounted for only 22% of total sales.
Apple must use its own cheap products to respond to low-cost competitors, which has become an ordinary point of view in the technology industry, but Apple usually choose to ignore. However, getting a good business model on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, that is, differentiated software supported by advanced hardware, did not succeed in the streaming TV business. Because in this area, content is fundamental. Apple TV can only continue to struggle without significant price cuts or content breakthroughs.
A sturdy set-top box market
Roku is not the only company that sells mainly cheap hardware.
At the end of 2014, Amazon launched the Fire TV Stick, priced at $40. Compared with the $100 Fire TV set-top box released earlier that year, this product has obvious performance problems. The most obvious is that the first version of the remote controller does not support voice commands.
However, consumers do not mind. According to data from Parks Associates, in less than a year, Amazon's sales have increased three-fold. A Parks spokesman said that in the United States broadband homes that own Amazon Fire TV devices, the use of Fire TV Stick accounted for 81%.
The success of low-cost streaming TV equipment is having a profound impact on Apple's TV business. According to data from Parks Associates and ComScore, Apple TV ranks fourth among U.S. broadband users, trailing Roku, Amazon Fire TV, and Google's Chromecast.
Apple is not only a victim of low-cost competition. According to NPD, in the fourth quarter of 2015, Apple introduced the fourth-generation Apple TV, which is priced at US$150, more expensive than the previous generation and more expensive than all products released by Amazon, Roku, or Google. At that time, Apple accounted for 32.3% of the US sales of streaming media devices (excluding Amazon Fire TV devices because NPD did not track). Since then, Apple's market share has been declining, to the current share of only 13.5%. Sales fell the most in the fourth quarter of 2016 because Apple stopped selling the old Apple TV, which was priced at $69. To some extent, Apple's damage is self-inflicted.
Conquering content
The most direct rebuttal to these surveys is that as long as Apple maintains its position in the high-end market and maintains a vibrant ecosystem of applications and services, it does not need to worry too much about market share.
In the ecosystem, Apple TV performed well. It did not suffer from lack of content due to the emergence of any large streaming media service (such as Amazon Prime Video will soon be released). It has become one of the starting platforms for a variety of streaming video applications including Hulu, including Live TV. , DirecTV Now, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Because Apple’s developer tools are very powerful and its user community is also known for spending more money, streaming media service providers are willing to support this platform even when market share is declining.
However, it is unclear whether the current high-end market has continuity. In January of this year, Apple’s Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri told the Financial Times that Apple TV's holiday sales in 2016 decreased year-on-year. This explains why Apple’s “other†product category (including the iPod and the stand-alone Mac monitor) has lost 8% of revenue in the quarter.
In any case, the weak market share has caused Apple to lose its influence in realizing what it really wants—to reinvent television. According to reports, Apple launched a program to create streaming TV services in 2015. Recently, it has also reached a cooperation with movie studios on the purchase price of 4K HDR movies. In addition, Apple also said it would invest $1 billion in original content. As Recode's Peter Kafka points out, Apple once won these types of content battles, but when most streaming TV viewers use Rokus, Fire TV, and Chromecast devices, Hollywood studios have almost no motivation. To change this situation.
All of this means that Apple will face a difficult decision: On the one hand, like Roku, Google and Amazon, to provide consumers with cheaper hardware equipment, another option is to accept less market share, but then What comes is the decline in bargaining power. Now all the data shows which direction to choose is possible for Apple.
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