Analyst Expects Revolutionary Apple (AAPL) TV Product

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 28, 10:04AM EST

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Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) new television product could do more to change the industry since the dawn of color TV, if an analyst at Sterne Agee is correct.

The research firm said that its analyst Shaw Wu notes that if Apple TV could offer users the ability to choose their own content for a monthly fee, Apple could easily leg-up the competition, and forever change the game of television.

The belief is no more than speculation since Apple has done little to disclose what its next generation of its TV product will be like. The current version of Apple TV is merely a streaming media service similar to Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) and the Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) television product. None of these are terribly different from cable VOD, or the fiber to the home telecom TV products.

Wu writes that

We continue to hear what AAPL would love to do is offer users the ability to choose their own customized programming, i.e., whichever channels/shows they want for a monthly subscription fee. This is obviously much more complicated from a licensing standpoint. And in our view, would change the game for television and give AAPL a big leg-up against the competition.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.