Apple TV strategy realisations (and failure): you can’t do an iTunes and become the unified storefront and aggregator. Without that, you also can’t add enough Apple-specific UX to a TV for a price premium or real market share. And there’s no broader app opportunity on TVs.

Comparing with Roku/Chromecast/Fire, Roku is closest to Apple’s model but may have seemed to have too little control over the overall UX for Apple to do that. Chromecast/Fire are too low-margin? Or too thin…

(In 2013 I said Apple should make an HDMI dongle - a month before the first Chromecast was announced https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2013/6/24/apple-tvs)

Netflix is a TV comply, and Amazon decided to buy TV shows as a zero-marginal-cost benefit to drive Prime subscriptions. But Apple never made a record label, bank, MVNO… or TV studio. It wanted its TV product to be a tech product. But…

The tech part of TV is a generic commodity (yes, some of it is hard engineering, but it’s not Apple’s kind of differentiation). Everything is changing, but all the leverage and all the arguments are in LA, not SV.

TLDR: Apple has failed in TV, completely, for all the reasons discussed a decade ago. But then tech isn’t really playing much of a role in TV in general. Tech changed the landscape, but the players are all TV people.

It’s kind of an interesting paradox - tech totally changed the TV landscape, and yet plays only a peripheral role in it