Looking too see what's on offer in Australia, Amazon Prime and Stan offer little, and Foxtel are part of Murdochs stable and expensive so let's see what Apple offer.
As noted this isn’t news. The only question was (and still is), “how much?”. Apple would be smart to come in low (like Disney) ... Netflix has shown you can raise prices if you have a good product. Apple needs subscribers/mindshare in this domain, and can worry about bottom line later.
I have Netflix and Prime, and will certainly try TV+ ... these subscriptions are so cheap compared to cable, it’s safe to assume people will subscribe to at least 2-3, especially as they start to realize they really can cut their cable.
Lol. They have completely lost the plot. No one is going to pay for this, unless it comes with content we don’t already know about (as in, iTunes Store movie and tv content).
Colossal failure incoming. It’s not too late to can this DOA service.
You dudes are hilarious. It’s like Apple has never launched products before and you have. lol
Lol. They have completely lost the plot. No one is going to pay for this, unless it comes with content we don’t already know about (as in, iTunes Store movie and tv content).
Colossal failure incoming. It’s not too late to can this DOA service.
You dudes are hilarious. It’s like Apple has never launched products before and you have. lol
That's a strawman argument. The issue here centers around Apple's core competencies. They can launch and do launch products effectively but said product success depends on if that product is in a core competency. Apple has no experience providing original content they have no experience making cars and thus both project will become money pits.
Hell it's debatable whether Apple developers good software anymore. I can't point to any software they've done that has been excellent. I'm bullish on the Apple Ecosystem but common sense must prevail. They're not going to sustain revenue running a PG-13 streaming service with Disney delivering the whole kit and caboodle for 5.80 per month.
I have Prime and Netflix. I'll be adding this as well. I'll watch what I want, when I want and work it around my schedule, not make it a priority. Talking about this as a failure shows how completely ignorant the forum is of the writing, production budgets, experienced directors and more that are all on-board.
Get back to me in about 2 years. People are only willing to pay for so many services. They are trying to reduce costs over cable. Get too many services and you're back to paying cable TV prices. Disney+ and Netflix will be the top 2. Then, Hulu will be 3rd. Apple will be lucky if the come out being 4th or 5th in this race.
Lol. They have completely lost the plot. No one is going to pay for this, unless it comes with content we don’t already know about (as in, iTunes Store movie and tv content).
Colossal failure incoming. It’s not too late to can this DOA service.
You dudes are hilarious. It’s like Apple has never launched products before and you have. lol
Uh...
This one isn't complicated. At all. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, HBO, Disney....these services are identical in the sense that: their bread and butter, the content that people actually pay for, is the wealth of content they have licensed or purchased, and provide. Their original content is just a microscopic supplement that few people actually care about and that no one anywhere is being asked to pay for by itself. Disney is the newest player here, but after spending ungodly amounts of its own money to buy up every property they could convince people to sell...they now have a somewhat decent catalog for their own service (but not enough to command higher end market prices).
Somehow this is being missed in the conversation. Apple has not announced plans to include iTunes Store content (movies and tv) with AppleTV+. If they planned to do that, it would be the first thing they talked about, because people would actually want to pay for that. Apple is the only player operating under the delusion that they can produce original content, and only original content, and actually sell it.
No one cares about any of Apple's original content, and that is all they're offering.
Lol. They have completely lost the plot. No one is going to pay for this, unless it comes with content we don’t already know about (as in, iTunes Store movie and tv content).
"No one is going to pay for this." LOL. Apple has about 1.5 Billion devices in the world with about 800 million users, and will have a half a BILLION subscriptions to its services next year. If even only a half of one percent of a growing user base subscribe to it, that's millions of monthly subscribers. But yeah, "no one" will.
Disney's market cap is about a fifth of Apple's but they are the biggest threat to Apple in the next ten year
LOL. You better tell Apple and Disney that as they have execs on each other's boards. No, Disney is not a threat to Apple at all. They are only "competing" in one area: streaming, which you could argue is a threat to Disney is some limited aspect, but it's only a tiny fraction of Apple's business and will remain that way. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised for Apple and Disney to package a bundle, as their programming goals, (no graphic violence, extreme gore, x rated content, etc. ) makes them complementary. It's why Disney announced they will be participating in the new Apple TV channels.
Retreads (Amazing Stories) and long in the tooth media types (Oprah Winfrey, among others) is not compelling.
Tim Cook is going to find out that Disney already owns the Disney market and HBO owns the HBO market. AT&T now owns the Warner library and Disney the Disney and Fox library of content. Disney has ESPN and AT&T has CNN. Exactly what special thing does Apple have to bring?
Retreads (Amazing Stories) and long in the tooth media types (Oprah Winfrey, among others) is not compelling.
Tim Cook is going to find out that Disney already owns the Disney market and HBO owns the HBO market. AT&T now owns the Warner library and Disney the Disney and Fox library of content. Disney has ESPN and AT&T has CNN. Exactly what special thing does Apple have to bring?
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of viewers. Your same admonishment was applied to Netflix when they started producing their own original content, then Amazon. People laughed at the thought, but a short time later they have some compelling content and Apple is already ahead of the pace set by Netflix. What you and many others misunderstand is that video streaming is now largely a commoditized business where consumers don't have loyalty to a particular service, there is some good content everywhere, so viewers move around and are choosing largely on price. That's Netflix's achilles heel as they can't raise prices enough to keep up with their rapidly escalating costs. (Remember that they are ALL competing for the same limited group of actors, producers and directors, and there isn't anything any one of them are doing that is unique or hard to duplicate if you have enough money).
BTW, had to laugh when you listed CNN as an "asset." CNN is the lowest rated and has the fewest viewers of any of the cable news networks. It's an albatross, not an asset.
I subscribe to HBO during different times of the year and drop it when I have watched what I consider interesting. I keep Netflix pretty much all year long. Brit box has one show which runs for 4 months so I subscribe only during that time. Apple TV plus I suspect will not be interesting to me but I will check it out. No I am not a Game of thrones fan but I thought The Leftovers on HBO was brilliant.
Disney dropped the mic after announcing its $7/mo service. Few, if anyone, could challenge all of its franchises and back catalog, and at that price?
Of course, for anyone who believes that it will remain at the price, long term, I have a bridge to sell you.
Apple appears to be serious about ATV+, and since owning/producing one's own content is the key to the media business, it had better be prepared for a long, costly slog.
As an Apple investor, I would really like to see an Apple Store at Disney World and Disneyland.
As others have opined, it is quite unclear how this will go. Might, might not, as the details are important in deciding that.
Apple has lots of failures to learn from. e.g. Ping, MobileMe. I think that, to be "insanely great" or an instant hit, they will need to offer very compelling pricing, be it in forms of bundles (ATV+, iBooks, Apple Music for $99/yr for a family) or very inexpensive ($.99) rentals. I kinda don't expect this - at least initially.
[...] I bet the Apple TV app will be the platform of choice to watch them all because of it's ease of use and SIRI AI integration.
It might be if it WORKED, but it doesn't. That tends to diminish its appeal.
I use Apple's own Homeshare feature to serve up movies and TV shows to the TVs around the house. Siri and the TV Search app both completely ignore it.
For example, the iTunes Store sells only the first two seasons of the old sitcom Barney Miller, so I bought the complete series on DVD and ripped it. If I ask Siri to play that show, all I get is an offer to buy those first two seasons on iTunes. It does not recognize that I already own the entire series, and that there's a Mac in the living room dedicated to making it available for playback.
The same thing happens with Netflix. Try using your TV to search for Stranger Things, Ozark, or The Kominski Method. It doesn't work.
hmurchison said: Apple has no experience providing original content they have no experience making cars and thus both project will become money pits.
Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu had no experience either. In reality, all these companies are doing the same thing: hiring people who do have the experience while throwing a lot of money around. It remains to be seen if this "new" version of providing television and movie content is actually better than the "old" version, but that's equally true of Apple's competitors as it is for Apple itself.
No idea on whether a subscription service will work. However, if it doesn't, I think it could easily be converted to a free model that will drive sales.
The key here is price. Since the model we are moving to is multiple services on offer, the overall cost of subscribing to not one but three, four, five services has to be low enough to entice consumers to sign up for all of them or at least many of them. If a content provider tries to run up the cost, it will be left behind. On the other hand, if providers resist the urge to gouge consumers, we can have quite a few providers build up a large number of subscribers yet by virtue of the number of subscribers, still make a lot of money.
Look at it this way, no one content provider will be able to offer it all and as such pricing for each individual service has to be formulated on the assumption that consumers will only sign up for that particular service if it fits in a scenario where said consumer has to budget for more than one service. This means staying below $10 a month if you want to attreact a lot of subscribers. If you think that you have to charge more to make a profit, don't bother because charging more will only result in disappointing numbers and weak revenue. It's counterintuitive but to make more money, in this scenario, you need to charge less. If in time, with subscriotions established in large numbers, providers start increasing the price, over the long haul, that will only motiviate consumers to cancel certain services. There is a ceiling on what providers can expect to charge and keep the numbers up. Punch through that ceiling and this will fail miserably. Resist a greedy approach and everybody wins.
Going on the amount of content vs Disney, Netflix, Hulu etc if Apple charge for it they should put it out at $2 per month, they might even get away with $5 at a push. Otherwise folk will just “download” their shows for free elsewhere.
Apple could easily charge about $5 a month and get so many subscribers that it could easily surpass let's say $1.4 billion in annual investment. $5 a month translates into $60 a year per subscription. To reach $1.4 billion, you'd need something like 23.34 million subscribers. Considering the installed base of people using Apple devices, that's incredibly easy to achieve. It's not simply that the content would require an Apple TV to access because it will be accesible through other devices as well. In addition, Apple, as is its habit, has waited for Apple TVs to be purchased in significant enough numbers already to help this along. Lowering the cost of the Apple TV devices is easily doable at this point because it's a highly capable device as is, hence there is no need to upgrade the hardware that is now a couple of years old. Older tech available at lower cost means you can simply lower the price and leave the hardware as is. Drop the price in the fall concurrently with launching the service and it adds momentum.
The key is that these streaming services have to price themselves to fit into a model where all of them collectively add up to an affordable cost to the end users. Do that, resist the urge to turn greedy and all of them will flourish. Apple has long tried to convince content providers to keep prices down on the assumption that lower prices counterintuitively generate more profit due to more units being moved with minimal extra cost in a streaming scenario. WIth Apple itself being the content producer, that approach can be pursued unfettererd.
For me, it's truly a golden age for TV viewers. Having grown up with only 13 broadcast channels, and later endured the cable bundle era of "57-channels-and-nothing-on," I thank the gods I no longer have to endure lowest common denominator ad-crammed stupidities like Leave It To Beaver, or GIlligan's Island, or Happy Days, and that all the advertising is on FaceBook or Google services, neither of which I use. Ad-free streaming services would have to charge a LOT more before I'd be unhappy with them.
Comments
Hell it's debatable whether Apple developers good software anymore. I can't point to any software they've done that has been excellent. I'm bullish on the Apple Ecosystem but common sense must prevail. They're not going to sustain revenue running a PG-13 streaming service with Disney delivering the whole kit and caboodle for 5.80 per month.
This one isn't complicated. At all. Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, HBO, Disney....these services are identical in the sense that: their bread and butter, the content that people actually pay for, is the wealth of content they have licensed or purchased, and provide. Their original content is just a microscopic supplement that few people actually care about and that no one anywhere is being asked to pay for by itself. Disney is the newest player here, but after spending ungodly amounts of its own money to buy up every property they could convince people to sell...they now have a somewhat decent catalog for their own service (but not enough to command higher end market prices).
Somehow this is being missed in the conversation. Apple has not announced plans to include iTunes Store content (movies and tv) with AppleTV+. If they planned to do that, it would be the first thing they talked about, because people would actually want to pay for that. Apple is the only player operating under the delusion that they can produce original content, and only original content, and actually sell it.
No one cares about any of Apple's original content, and that is all they're offering.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of viewers. Your same admonishment was applied to Netflix when they started producing their own original content, then Amazon. People laughed at the thought, but a short time later they have some compelling content and Apple is already ahead of the pace set by Netflix. What you and many others misunderstand is that video streaming is now largely a commoditized business where consumers don't have loyalty to a particular service, there is some good content everywhere, so viewers move around and are choosing largely on price. That's Netflix's achilles heel as they can't raise prices enough to keep up with their rapidly escalating costs. (Remember that they are ALL competing for the same limited group of actors, producers and directors, and there isn't anything any one of them are doing that is unique or hard to duplicate if you have enough money).
BTW, had to laugh when you listed CNN as an "asset." CNN is the lowest rated and has the fewest viewers of any of the cable news networks. It's an albatross, not an asset.
Apple has lots of failures to learn from. e.g. Ping, MobileMe. I think that, to be "insanely great" or an instant hit, they will need to offer very compelling pricing, be it in forms of bundles (ATV+, iBooks, Apple Music for $99/yr for a family) or very inexpensive ($.99) rentals. I kinda don't expect this - at least initially.
I use Apple's own Homeshare feature to serve up movies and TV shows to the TVs around the house. Siri and the TV Search app both completely ignore it.
For example, the iTunes Store sells only the first two seasons of the old sitcom Barney Miller, so I bought the complete series on DVD and ripped it. If I ask Siri to play that show, all I get is an offer to buy those first two seasons on iTunes. It does not recognize that I already own the entire series, and that there's a Mac in the living room dedicated to making it available for playback.
The same thing happens with Netflix. Try using your TV to search for Stranger Things, Ozark, or The Kominski Method. It doesn't work.
Look at it this way, no one content provider will be able to offer it all and as such pricing for each individual service has to be formulated on the assumption that consumers will only sign up for that particular service if it fits in a scenario where said consumer has to budget for more than one service. This means staying below $10 a month if you want to attreact a lot of subscribers. If you think that you have to charge more to make a profit, don't bother because charging more will only result in disappointing numbers and weak revenue. It's counterintuitive but to make more money, in this scenario, you need to charge less. If in time, with subscriotions established in large numbers, providers start increasing the price, over the long haul, that will only motiviate consumers to cancel certain services. There is a ceiling on what providers can expect to charge and keep the numbers up. Punch through that ceiling and this will fail miserably. Resist a greedy approach and everybody wins.
The key is that these streaming services have to price themselves to fit into a model where all of them collectively add up to an affordable cost to the end users. Do that, resist the urge to turn greedy and all of them will flourish. Apple has long tried to convince content providers to keep prices down on the assumption that lower prices counterintuitively generate more profit due to more units being moved with minimal extra cost in a streaming scenario. WIth Apple itself being the content producer, that approach can be pursued unfettererd.