Bloomberg story unreliable. Also Mr. Gurman is setting up a skewed stew of rival comparisons to put Apple in worst light such as: "Apple hasn’t announced pricing for Apple TV+, but is weighing $9.99 a month, the people said, which would match Apple Music and Apple News+. Netflix and Amazon Prime charge as little as $8.99, while Disney+ plans to seek $6.99 when its service debuts in November."
Making this about how good the content is, really misses the point. Even if the content is superb, if it consists of a few Apple productions, $10 a month will not fly. Other established services deliver strong content plus a lot of other material of varying quality. I think it's a great idea for Apple to not set a price and then scramble to pick up enough content to justify that price. Instead, what I hope Apple will do is offer its original programming focused on quality and set a lower price to ensure enough subscribers are picked up to make a decent profit. A low price would set up Apple's service not as a competitor to the other broader services. Instead, it would serve as a compliment to those services because quite a few consumers would be fine with let's say paying $4.99 a month to access several quality offerings to compliment what is already available. For streaming services to flourish with so many options, the overall cost to subscribing to those services has to be kept under control. If instead each service tries to be a service that is chosen over some other providers, everybody loses.
I feel like Apple Arcade is a much better deal. 5 dollars a month for exclusive games that I legit can't get anywhere else. Whereas Apple TV+ is going to be 10 dollars a month for probably one new show a month? I mean maybe they're going to air these week to week, which means we'll have four or five new episodes a week? Even then that's not that much content, and that's assuming I'm going to like EVERYTHING, which I probably won't. Also if I try it out, cool I either get a few shows that I can binge, and then have nothing, or worse I have a few episodes I can watch, and then nothing.
And best of all, there will be ways to get this content without paying. Apple Arcade? Those are games that won't be available anywhere else, and will likely not be easy to pirate. Apple TV+? Yeah that's going to be on torrent sites and other places within hours. At this point they have a small enough amount of content that you can't build a service out of it. Sure they might not need a TON of content, they might be relying on the fact that people are also going to have Netflix, Hulu, Disney, Prime and HBO, but at that point you're limiting yourself to just being that streaming service that gets added on when other people have already subscribed to everything else.
So much hypocrisy. You realize TV+ is ALSO offering content "that won't be available anywhere else"? Actually TV+ content is even more exclusive as some Arcade games are available on consoles already.
"and that's assuming I'm going to like EVERYTHING"
Same logic with Arcade. What makes you assume you'll like EVERYTHING on Apple Arcade?
Apple may be in for a rude awakening if they charge $10/month for a starting lineup of 5 sub par or average shows that seem to me will struggle to find a huge audience. They would do well to include access to the entire iTunes video library at that price, just like what they are doing with Apple Music. I mean honestly, they would have to be INSANE if they think this will fly with just those five shows.
$10/month for Apple News+, $10/month for Apple Music, $10/month for Apple TV+, $5/month for Apple Arcade. They should optionally bundle it all for about $20-25/month and go from there.
Great suggestion. I have been arguing for a bundled service for a long time. People in the eco-system sould be given the opportunity to buy into bundled services at a discount. We need a three tier plan: Gold, Silver and Bronze. The Gold Plan would provide a single subscription price for Apple Music, Apple News, Apple TV+, iTunes, books. I know I would pay a single, all encompassing subscription price for such a bundle, and so would many others. The price can easily be subsidized because Apple would more than make it up by increased volume fro its users. The next two tiers can be priced a but lower depending on what is bundled. THIS is the way for Apple to distinguish itself from the other streaming services and use its financial muscle. Throw in a 6 month trial period for free for all new iPhone users, say starting with the iPhone X.
$9.99 per month for a slew of new shows but no existing series? What about free hit movies? Seems like this is going to be a long slow journey for Apple.
Some folks don’t get it. It is not quantity but quality. Some folks paid $15 for HBO in order to watch Game of Thrones.
Considering all the never seen before new shows that Apple has, I think there will be several major hits amongst them and at 10 bucks, it’s a gift.
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Some folks paid $15 for HBO in order to watch Game of Thrones.
Considering all the never seen before new shows that Apple has, I think there will be several major hits amongst them and at 10 bucks, it’s a gift.