Apple Wants iTunes To Replace Your Pay TV For $US30 A Month

Apple’s apparently pitching to US networks a subscription plan that would deliver all your TV shows through iTunes for $US30 a month, with the goal of launching it next year.

But don’t hold your breath on it happening yet: Peter Kafka has “yet to hear of a single programmer that has made a firm commitment”. As he points out, while networks are constantly looking for new revenue, like those arsehole aliens in Independence Day moving from world to world consuming every natural resource, they’re nervous about the idea for a lot of reasons.

A lot of it has to do with the icky, sticky relationships between networks and pay TV operators, where everybody’s worried about losing out as people start to watch more and more TV content online, not in their living rooms — where streaming video eats up bandwidth, and advertising revenues aren’t nearly as rich (which is why Hulu wants to figure out new ways to get you to pay).

While these little complications might slow the process down, the exodus is inevitable. There’s no stopping this. The internet is the new pay TV: Netflix, Hulu, BitTorrent. Apple might not get to launch it in a few months, but it will happen. Just give it time. The actually crazy part, if you ask me, is that the Apple TV might even live up to its name. [Hulu]