Apple Doesn’t Need To Make the TV of the Future

There are too many legal and contractual battles in Hollywood for any one television service to become the repository for everything.

The studios are loath to give any company access to too much of their content for what they perceive to be too little money. It’s in the industry’s interest to ensure there’s vibrant competition between Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and iTunes—if any one service gets access to everything, it would gain the sort of power that Apple wields over the music industry, and that Amazon now has in books. In other words, the future of entertainment is bound to be fragmented. And in a fragmented world, the Xbox’s magical powers to cut through the clutter may be the best thing to happen to your TV.