CarmB

StrangeDays said:

lame. The point of paying for a streaming service is for access. Making existing customers go last is taking them for granted 

If content producers can’t make a profit, it causes them to produce more reluctantly. If Apple is to justify investing in expensive prestige productions by first-rate directors, it has to recover most of the cost of production. Frankly, it’s critical to offer this film in a variety of formats, including the usual like a significant run in theatres and the availability to consumers for rent or purchase. If you are Martin Scorsese, you want more than strictly Apple TV+ subscribers to have access to your work. If you’re Apple, deep though your pockets may be, you need to keep costs manageable. There is no fear on the part of Apple TV+ subscribers that they will not have access to the movie. That one has to wait a few months for that access is only a problem for those of us for whom death is imminent. The rest of us can, if we wish, wait a bit and then watch the film via Apple TV+. As an Apple TV+ subscriber, I want Apple to pay for a prestige production and be able to make it work financially so that Apple will do this sort of thing again. If that means the film in question will be in circulation in revenue-generating scenarios for a while before I get to watch it via my subscription, I’m fine with that. It means A-List directors are comfortable working with Apple and Apple can make the numbers work, despite paying for a project like Killers of the Flower Moon. That I’m likely to see the film on Apple TV+ before the Oscars, strikes me as a timely streaming-service launch. 

badmonk said:

I think people misunderstand what Apple (& also Amazon) is selling here.  it isn’t AppleTV, it’s Apple One where AppleTV is seen as a loss leader for a bundle that includes non-TV offerings.

In my case, I am getting dependable iCloud BU, Apple Music, Apple News (which allowed me to cancel several magazine subscriptions), Apple Fitness as well as  AppleTV for myself and my wife.  The only thing we don’t use is Apple Arcade since we don’t play games.

Apple doesn’t need to buy old media at an enormous cost.  Apple just needs to keep doing what it does.  This is especially true if the future of spectator sports and entertainment is a more immersive AR/VR format that will need to be created anew.  The attention span economy is already stretched to the point where owning large troves of legacy media just does not make  really any financial sense.

So Apple isn’t going to be buying Disney.  Sorry.

Analysts seem to not understand what Apple wants to achieve here.

Apple would please me a lot more if they offered a bundle set-up in which one could choose three, four, etc. services of the consumer’s choosing for a discount. I would like to be able to sign up for Apple TV+, Fitness+, and News at a discount. Can’t do that. Apple One is too much money considering I don’t need several of the components. What good is a discount on a service you can easily live without?

Want to reduce churn then lower the cost of signing up for a full year. Ad-supported options also work. Netflix here in Canada costs $5.99 a month ad-supported and at that price keeping it year-round makes a lot of sense. Paramount+ is the one streaming service I don’t have and, frankly, it’s just not worth the bother considering how much else is being offered up by all the other services. If you already have Prime, Apple TV+, Netflix, and Max (Crave here in Canada), who would have time to watch whatever lesser programming that is served up by Paramount+. There is a lot more value in getting Apple TV+ than Paramount+ and if you bundle Apple TV+ with Paramount+ for a few dollars more, that’s just not an appealing offering.

It’s simple, really, if streaming services don’t want consumers to only carry their services for part of the year, stop overcharging. Most of us have a hard limit on how much we’re comfortable spending on TV content. Streaming services need to operate with that limit in mind.   We’re all getting squeezed from so many directions these days - groceries, housing, transportation and so on - that to just keep paying more and more for something to watch on TV is truly aggravating. In my youth, you put up an antenna, hooked it up to your TV and away you went. Maybe we had to wait a year or so for Hollywood movies to land on network TV and they were broadcast with annoying commercials. Yet, once you paid for that antenna - $100 or so - it was cost-free. Saw a lot of great, classic Hollywood fare that way back in the 1960s and into the 1970s. Today . . . 

Make that 40 hours (2,400 minutes).

In a world in which we have in excess of 2,400 hours of Gilligan’s Island in the bank, a couple of hours from a brilliant director about a significant topic doesn’t seem at all like a waste of time.