exclusivity

At the Spring Forward event, Apple and HBO announced HBO Now, an over-the-top unbundled streaming service for HBO shows, like Game of Thrones, independent of a cable subscription. They claimed that HBO Now would be ‘exclusive to Apple TV and iOS devices for three months’. This seemed like a great promotion for Apple’s television offerings, coinciding with a price cut of the Apple TV box to $69.

However, Sling TV has now announced that it will be offering the same deal through its service: HBO shows for $15 a month. This throws shade at Apple’s announcement — signing up for Sling TV will make HBO available on devices like the Roku this month. It is worth noting that the Sling deal also requires a subscription to Sling itself, HBO is only available as an add-on, which is an additional $20 a month.

Sling has found a ‘loophole’ in Apple’s deal so that it can offer cable-independent HBO content this month as well, sidelining Apple’s three month exclusivity window …

Expand
Expanding
Close

After an undeniably bad two weeks of press, MCX CEO Dekkers Davidson seems to have changed the company’s tune on CurrentC’s exclusivity policy that prompted retailers like CVS and Rite Aid to disable NFC terminals and block Apple’s iPhone 6-backed mobile payment system Apple Pay. Davidson told Re/code in an interview that MCX, the merchant consortium behind the Apple Pay competitor known as CurrentC, will lift the exclusivity policy in a matter of “months, not years.”

Previously, the MCX CEO only vaguely hinted that the retail consortium would consider allowing participants to accept both CurrentC, which is still in development, and Apple Pay, which launched in the United States earlier last month, saying that the scenario “could be entirely possible.”
Expand
Expanding
Close