Apple Tv Plus Still Seeks its Big Win

Despite a $6bn advertising budget, the top names in Entertainment, and hundreds of millions of prospective buyers, Apple TV Plus unveiled an ambitious target in November 2019: to build Apple’s own HBO. Yet Apple TV Plus is hardly a part of the online community, just over six months later.

Now, it’s time for Apple to shine. The corporation is offering access to almost everyone with an Apple computer, and despite a worldwide pandemic, the whole population is left at home with little to do except watch Television. The service is filled with high-profile names such as Oprah Winfrey, Jason Momoa, and Jennifer Aniston and a new series starring Chris Evans have just debuted.

While most signs suggest that Apple TV Plus is off to a late start. While that’s to be expected for a brand-new company that’s just building its catalog of shows and videos, it means that six months from now when those free trials start running out, Apple will have an even harder time.

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Confidence in Apple shows has gone down for the most part. Google Trends data is showing only a few upticks in search of interest between the time the service was launched and now, with engagement mostly fading. The Morning Show won a few awards, and Mythic Quest got excellent ratings, but hundreds of original titles later, it’s not obvious that people actually open the game.

Actually we don’t know how many people are using Apple TV Plus since Apple executives still need to dole out subscriber numbers. According to The Hollywood Reporter, executives are pleased with the results so far but being happy doesn’t mean getting a figure worth boasting over. This contrasts sharply with Disney, which launched its Disney Plus streaming service two weeks after Apple, boasting over 55 million subscribers.

Apple’s silence, on the one hand, is not that weird: Apple doesn’t necessarily release figures for its goods. The company noticeably stopped announcing how many phones and tablets it sold a few years ago which critics pointed out were sales at the same time.

Apple hasn’t announced Apple Arcade subscriber figures either, and Apple Music numbers have come mostly in news reports. However, another line of thinking is that firms prefer to share figures when they have plenty to brag about. After reaching 10 million, Disney announced its first-day figures, and then made another announcement outside its daily earnings calls to claim that the service reached 50 million subscribers.

Without official statistics, the sector is left to rely on reports and leaks from third parties. The latest figures from Ampere Research indicate that Apple has around 33 million TV Plus viewers, but a recent Bloomberg report cites a competent individual saying the figure is closer to 10 million.

HBO currently has just under 10 million subscribers to bring it into perspective, and Hulu has just over 32 million subscribers, but all are distributed only in the United States.

The figures for Apple TV Plus are not abysmal relative to the new market, but they come with a big caveat: most of them actually don’t compensate. Apple is effectively offering someone buying a new Apple app a year of free support. Those are hundreds of millions of potential clients. (Apple shipped iPhones worth $28.96 billion in the current quarter alone).

Whether those customers hang around comes November 1st, when the one year free trial period ends for the earliest customers of the service, is where the dilemma of Apple really begins, Tase said. Hulu’s $0.99 Black Friday deal led to the platform’s subscriber growth, but when the $0.99 period had ended, more than 50 percent of people canceled their service, Tase said. Will people spending $0 on Apple TV Plus at this time start paying $4.99 a month?

“The point is, I think: look at the overall signups,” Tase said. “Sure, maybe nobody’s sticking around. Even if they do — or only a small portion of them do — it can become a kind of a major SVOD business overnight.

While every streaming service is seeing an upsurge in viewing time and subscribers, Apple TV Plus is the only service that saw a significantly lower percentage of sign-ups in April compared to Disney Plus, Amazon Prime, and Netflix. The issues of Apple TV Plus are not that dissimilar to those of Quibi, another subscription company struggling to find a location for it. There’s not enough to hold users coming back day after day, and very little of the deals made available to customers encourage discussion.

The Morning Show is the only show that has made an impact on American viewers, maybe. That alone makes for a slower start for Apple than competitors: The first six months of original programming by Netflix have created House of Cards, Hemlock Grove, and Orange Is the New Black, with two of those shows transforming into big hits. Disney Plus has produced only one big success so far, but for eight consecutive weeks, The Mandalorian has been the focus of attention, dominating the pop culture.

It is not entirely fair to compare the slimmer offerings of Apple TV Plus to streamers like Netflix, and mainstream networks like FX and HBO. It took years for both networks to become today’s powerhouses. In the years leading up to the ’90s, HBO started experimenting with original content, but it wasn’t until The Larry Sanders Show in 1992 that people heard. Similarly, FX was predominantly known for running reruns and canceled one-season shows until a decade after the network launched The Shield, Rescue Me, and Nip / Tuck. Netflix and Hulu built their initial subscriber base by offering an exhaustive number of licensed television shows and movies that people wanted to watch.

On the other hand, Apple TV Plus subscribers will likely be forced to pay $5 a month for only a tiny slate of originals. Apple is already considering doing something close to those other networks, according to a recent Bloomberg study stating that the organization is planning to buy old TV shows and videos.

For all these reasons and more it is impossible to label Apple TV Plus anything concrete six months in. It doesn’t claim Disney Plus figures — a subscription channel that, due to the power of its iconic back catalog, had 10 million users on the first day — but Apple TV Plus doesn’t really have to.

Conclusion:

Apple TV Plus does not have the same pressure on it as a Netflix or Disney Plus; scaling subscriber growth is central to the main revenue structure of the service, but Apple TV Plus is a way of keeping people within the overall ecosystem of Apple.