Apple's newest hire is another step towards ads in Apple TV+
Apple has hired away an advertising executive from NBCUniversal, as it continues to build out its rumored video ad business for Apple TV+.
Apple TV+ logo
Apple has been rumored to be adding advertising to Apple TV+ for a while, which could help raise Apple's revenue for the streaming service. It appears that it is still fleshing out the team that will helm the effort.
Joseph Cady, an NBCUniversal ad executive, has reportedly jumped ship and signed up with Apple, according to Business Insider. A 14-year exec for NBCU, Cady oversaw partnerships with other tech giants, having previously worked in development and strategy positions.
It is thought that Cady will be working with Winston Crawford, Apple's head of global ad sales and chief of a team that supports Apple TV+. He is also expected to work with Lauren Fry, another video ad sales executive.
The hiring is the latest in a string of similar moves by Apple to secure people with experience in video and TV ad sales. Apple's hiring spree is likely to be part of a larger effort to introduce an advertising tier to the ad-free Apple TV+ service.
Currently, Apple doesn't offer a version of Apple TV+ with any advertising, but that hasn't stopped its rivals from doing so. Netflix launched a "Basic with Ads" tier in 2022, while Amazon Prime Video introduced advertisements in late 2023 unless customers paid $2.99 per month.
Apple does have some experience with video advertising. During 2023, it did sell some screen time to advertisers for some Major League Soccer matches, with live TV a promising venue for serving commercials to users.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
First, my thought. Then, my wish.
Rumors usually follow the… normal path of general business… and apply that conclusions to Apple. But Apple… at leas as I see it… follows other… self-choosen… rules.
Streaming media lives on ad-revenues… except Apple. In other companies… including a cheaper tier with ads is a way to get more subscriptions.
But… Apple has opted for ‘quality of programming’ and… obviously… the best user experience.
That… for me… means ‘avoid TV ads.’ That's my thought.
But as Apple is hiring ad people… it is obvious that… something is being cooked.
And my wish is… that Apple TV+ stay always free of ads… but sports could include them!
In soccer's World Cup… in the TV transmissions… there are advertisement in the side of the field but there are also ‘blocks’ where the local TV station add its own advertisements.
Maybe… soccer or baseball… or anything coming in the subject… could include ‘in screen’ advertisements or… advertisement in between actions and games.
Once again… I hope we never see any ad-supported tier in Apple TV+!
Personally, the number 1 annoyance of the Internet are ads. Actually, number 2-23 as well.
Could Apple “afford” to not place ads? To give more than 5GB free iCloud Storage? Go into the market of making some of the friggin’ best-to-use routers? I think they could without going bankrupt. And certainly delight lots of users that love High Quality, “Just works”, “Apple’s different” etc.
Undortunately, in a parallel world, that might work. Here, unfortunately, more is always better.. And sometimes considered not enough. What stays is the Kobe that at least there will be an ad-free tier somewhere in the offering.
Ontogeny really doesn't recapitulate phylogeny in the real world, but streaming video appears to be copying the bottomless descent of cable. Heck, I'm old enough to remember when the History Channel actually had history programming instead of, y'know, sharks, Nazis, and early medieval Scandinavians with axes behaving badly.
But I concur about the ads. They didn't do it with Apple Music when everyone else was introducing ad-supported tiers, so I hope they stay the course with Apple TV+ as well. The only thing that will be totally understandable is if they introduce ads specifically for sports content, which has naturally occurring breaks in play. That will be the one concession I give them.
No major streamer except for Netflix is making money. They all continue to lose money, hundreds of millions, quarter after quarter. This is not a sustainable business model in any business. The losses have dropped since ad-supported tiers were introduced and it is hoped that these tiers will be the path to eventual profitability. One thing is clear: without these tiers, the streamers couldn't have survived.
So what happened? The reasoning behind the ad-free subscription streaming model was that Netflix would get to a billion subscribers, with the other major streamers getting into the mid to upper hundreds of millions. At that scale, the subscription ad-free model works. But then Netflix hit a wall at under 300 million subscribers and the alarm bells went off that the subscriber universe was going to be a whole lot smaller than anyone thought. And this happened while spending tens of billions of dollars each year on scripted shows, the majority of which almost no one was watching because that's what happens when you release more than 500 new shows to the public each year--who can possibly even know what's on? It would be a full time job just to track it all.
So... the lower-priced, ad-supported tier became a necessity for streamers to have a shot at remaining in business. And still some might not make it to profitability and survive, even with that extra revenue stream--we shall see. As for Apple: their bottom line for Apple TV+ must look terrible. I can't imagine how much they're losing per quarter. They likely have the smallest number of subscribers among the major streamers and, while they don't produce nearly as much content, a lot of what they do produce is incredibly expensive, especially in the sci-fi genre that plays a big role in Apple TV+ shows. Every episode of those series is at movie-level quality, and that costs tens of millions per episode to produce. Of course, for Apple, streaming is just a side business, and almost more like a marketing effort to further burnish and enhance Apple's high-quality brand. But still--it can't make sense even for Apple to continue sustaining huge losses in streaming, so an ad-supported tier would make sense.
Personally, I got hooked on ad-free streaming and I hope it can remain an option without getting ridiculously expensive. If you haven't noticed, the streamers are working hard to push people to their more profitable, ad-supported tiers by offering deals for them and not ad-free subscriptions. And, of course, there isn't a way to "DVR" streaming content and fast-forward through the ads--you're stuck with them playing through, which is a giant step backward from the DVR set-top box era.
Look at Apple's clientele. People that have bought into an Apple ecosystem aren't doing so because it's an inexpensive option. 10 dollars per month for Apple TV+ is nothing. My wife pays that for the cellular Apple Watch that she never wears.
Apple's interests in bidding on sports live streaming is tell you everything you need to know. The money is in the eyeballs and those breaks in game play.
It’s a choice.