Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said something quite interesting yesterday: he sees Apple and Netflix operating alongside each other with similar services in the market of the future.
Apple announced last month that it was planning a streaming service, complete with original shows from, among others, Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey. The firm intends to invest $2bn in programming, but it didn’t reveal how much it will eventually spend on the whole service.
Investors are keenly monitoring Apple’s television efforts as subscription services are becoming an ever more important part of its revenue as iPhone sales continue to drop.
Apple is, of course, going to experience fierce competition in this already crowded arena. This autumn, for example, Walt Disney will launch its own service – for which it will charge only $6.99 per month. YouTube is taking a totally different route: it recently announced that it was increasing the price of YouTube TV online (a bouquet of more than 70 television channels) to $49.99 a month.
While talking to investors during a conference call yesterday, Cook gave a clear indication that Apple didn’t plan to give viewers absolutely everything they could desire.
He said: “We think that most users are going to get multiple over-the-top products, and we’re going to do our best to convince them that the Apple TV+ product should be one of them.”
Referring to streaming TV services that are delivered via the internet instead of a conventional cable service, Cook added that there was a large move from the cable bundle to what he called “over the top.”
Apple released its quarterly earnings report yesterday, which showed that quarterly revenue declined by 5% compared to the same quarter in 2018. iPhone sales also dropped further.