CBS CEO Leslie Moonves again says he denied Steve Jobs access to TV programming for fear of disrupting revenue streams
Way back in November, CBS Chief Executive Officer Les Moonves told investors on an earnings call:
..the media company turned down a partnership with Apple for a streaming deal on the Apple TV. Moonves says that the deal was turned down because of the ad-split revenue that Apple was trying to reach an agreement over.
Fast forward to this weekend when the Hollywood Reporter caught up to Moonves at a FUCLA conference:
CBS CEO Leslie Moonves said Saturday that he was approached about a year ago by Steve Jobs to provide content for Apple’s long-rumored television service but he declined to participate.
Moonves told a conference audience that he met with Jobs, the late Apple CEO, and heard a pitch for what was billed as a subscription content service, but ultimately he said he wasn’t interested in providing CBS shows or films to the venture.
“I told Steve, ‘You know more than me about 99 percent of things but I know more about the television business,’ ” Moonves said, citing his concerns about providing content to a service that could disrupt CBS’ existing revenue streams. Moonves said Jobs, in characteristic fashion, strongly disagreed with his assessment.
Yeah, that is not much new, but the point is that CBS still is not going to be partnering with Apple any time soon.
However, streaming is pretty much dead anyway except for live TV, news, weather, and sports. Everything else worth watching is downloadable or already in a Hulu/Netflix/Amazon Cloud.
