Apple TV: It’s the Ecosystem, Stupid | STREAMED
STREAMED is a weekly column covering the people, companies and ideas behind the new media economy, written by Corin Faife and published by Breaker.
One story dominated news from the streaming industry since last week, and it was the launch of Apple TV+.
A quick summary of what we know: Apple’s new original content service will launch in fall 2019 priced at $4.99 per month — a price point was cheaper than most people expected from a notoriously premium company (remember the thousand dollar monitor stand?) but which will lead to a lot of subscriptions.
The streaming service will distribute only original programming, and so far the shows released seem more than enough to justify the $5 tag. There’s The Morning Show, a drama about the cut-throat world of morning news starring Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell; Helpsters, a children’s show in which Big Bird and other muppets teach kids to code; a reboot of Amazing Stories helmed by Steven Spielberg; and See, a post-apocalyptic drama in which Jason Momoa leads a band of survivors in a world where everyone has lost the power of sight to a virus. In total Apple has confirmed nine shows that will be available on launch, with at least another five to follow in coming months.
The new shows and big name actors are the shiny side of Apple’s move into original content, but behind the scenes the gears have been turning for years. Last year a reporter for Apple Insider helpfully assembled a list of executive hires made to Apple’s video division, dating back to March 2017 when former YouTube and Spotify exec Shiva Rajaraman was brought on to create an initial video content strategy. Rajaraman moved on to WeWork after less than six months at the company, but the development of the video content team continued apace: he was succeeded by execs who had formerly worked at Sony Pictures Television, Amazon Studios, HBO, Hulu, and the UK’s BBC and Channel 4.
Last week the Apple TV project also led to one significant departure: Walt Disney Co. CEO Robert Iger, a member of Apple’s board of directors since 2011, stepped down just before Apple announced its TV offering on September 10. Iger needed to leave in order to avoid regulatory scrutiny, as Disney is set to launch its own streaming service in November priced slightly above Apple at $6.99 per month. (Commentators observed that, intentionally or not, the combined cost of a Disney+ and Apple TV+ subscription is still a dollar cheaper than Netflix’s Standard package, which comes in at $12.99/month.)
With new competitors entering the market, naturally a lot of people are asking how much of a threat all of this is to Netflix, the company that defined streaming TV on demand. It’s easy to say that Apple is now a rival, but the two companies are playing a different game when it comes to the underlying business strategy — something hinted at by the fact that anyone buying a new iPhone, iMac or MacBook will get a year’s subscription to TV+ for free.
“While the price point may affect the broader landscape by pressuring other companies to keep prices low, becoming a streaming behemoth and pressuring other streaming services isn’t really the goal of Apple TV+ at all,” writes tech and media reporter Kelsey Sutton in AdWeek. “Apple’s investment in streaming isn’t really designed to take a chunk out of Netflix viewers. It’s designed to give consumers an incentive to buy more Apple hardware.”
Amazon is doing something similar with Prime video. The Prime subscription program is increasingly the cornerstone of Amazon’s business model, as Prime members spend significantly more than non-members on a yearly basis. Sellers also pay a premium to have their products included in the Prime delivery service, which makes the items rank higher in search results — crucial to success in the extremely competitive Amazon marketplace.
As more tech companies distribute and/or produce media through their own platforms, we see their ambition to form complete ecosystems, capturing users at each point of the consumption experience. Although Google doesn’t produce original content, on the media front it’s operating from a similar playbook to Apple: there’s now a browser (Chrome), a smartphone (Pixel), an audio offering (Google Play Music), a news platform (Google News) and a video channel (YouTube), meaning that theoretically a person could enjoy a media diet that was end-to-end Google.
Streaming platforms have brought us a wealth of great content, but there’s something slightly off about the idea of TV and movies that function as a kind of Trojan horse: content produced so that we’ll do something different (buy an iPhone or Android, subscribe to Prime, and so on). Even Netflix uses the same logic: The main metric used to evaluate shows is whether they bring in new subscribers, and lately the platform has been getting more ruthless in cancelling popular shows that don’t achieve this goal.
From the perspective of price and variety Netflix et al. are giving consumers a great deal, but audiences don’t like to feel at odds with the network’s values and nor do creators. After the cancellation of unique mystery/drama The OA by Netflix just two seasons in, star and co-creator Brit Marling wrote to fans in a heartfelt Instagram post: “Your words and images move us deeply. Not because the show must continue, but because for some people its unexpected cancellation begs larger questions about the role of storytelling and its fate inside late capitalism’s push towards consolidation and economies of scale.”
Right now there’s much hype around Apple TV+, but we’ll only get a real sense of the platform’s values when we see which shows are renewed for a second, a third, a fourth season and how that ties to Apple’s business strategy elsewhere. Otherwise, we have to assume that the ecosystem media model does not equate to simply giving viewers what they want.
