"Apple/Google might buy the Olympics rights and put it in iTunes/Play."
Are you sure that's better than the current model? You have to be very careful about listening to customers, because what people say they will pay for is quite different than what they will actually pay. Aggregately I might pay $80 for access to the Olympics and several other channels as well (I already do this, so this isn't really a stretch). I'm not so sure I'd pay $1.99 to watch the US Men's Basketball team play one game, and even if I would, NBC makes its money through advertisements. There is no proof that a pay-per-view model would bring nearly as much revenue as advertisements over wide broadcast would.
And this says nothing of the people who don't necessarily live in Silicon Valley and have ready access to broadband and iTunes.
It could be thought of as a loss leader that would bring a lot of people to buy Apple TVs or the Google equivalent. They might sub-license the rights to transmit the SD stream live on terrestrial TV. Etc.
Note that NBC stands to lose $1-200 mio on the olympics (I think is was in this week's Economist), so it's a loss leader for them as well.
Anyway, my point was merely to react to the idea that "I can't think of a better business model off the top of my head" somehow equates "it can't be disrupted".
Are you sure that's better than the current model? You have to be very careful about listening to customers, because what people say they will pay for is quite different than what they will actually pay. Aggregately I might pay $80 for access to the Olympics and several other channels as well (I already do this, so this isn't really a stretch). I'm not so sure I'd pay $1.99 to watch the US Men's Basketball team play one game, and even if I would, NBC makes its money through advertisements. There is no proof that a pay-per-view model would bring nearly as much revenue as advertisements over wide broadcast would.
And this says nothing of the people who don't necessarily live in Silicon Valley and have ready access to broadband and iTunes.