Apple TV+ has lost the plot

Weird thing happened last week (no, not that). Apparently, Apple woke up one day and realized it was spending a mess of money on TV shows.

Time to kill off some characters!

The company seemingly wants to shed the image in the industry that it will pay more than rivals, simply because it is cash-rich.

9to5Mac, July 22, 2024

Hey, there are worse images to have. Like the Macalope’s “will torrent more than rivals, simply because he is cash-poor” image.

Cutting back too much might be a bit of a problem as Apple has carved out a niche for itself with high-concept science fiction shows like “Foundation,” “Silo,” and “Dark Matter” that have fairly high budgets, both for cast and special effects.

That’s not to say you can’t make great shows with smaller budgets. “Ted Lasso” at least started out with a modest budget which went up a lot in season 3 as people said, “A show about people being nice to each other? Yes, please.”

Reducing costs is not the only thing Apple has planned to make sure it doesn’t have to switch to fried bologna sandwiches in the cafeteria at Apple Park.

“Apple eyes ads on Apple TV+, claims report.”

Yes, the natural life cycle of the online streaming service has caught up to Cupertino. From “We make the shows you love to watch” to “Okay, but we do need to make money off of this” to “Stop using your parents’ login, you freeloading hipsters, we need that extra $19 a month” to “We’re doing ads now.”

Sniff. They grow up so fast.

As Jason Snell noted, ads were pretty much inevitable on TV+ and we’ve been hearing about them coming for a while now. An ad-supported tier is fine–good, even!–but it gets a little messy. Sometimes even when you pay full price, you see ads.

Apple has already included limited advertising in its live sports events, such as last year’s Major League Soccer coverage, where ads were incorporated even for Season Pass holders.

Ads and crackdowns and price hikes all certainly seem to be working pretty well for Netflix, at least.

“Netflix’s subscriber and earnings growth gather more momentum as password-sharing crackdown pays off.”

One wonders how high subscription prices can go before people start canceling. Netflix has not found the ceiling yet.

If the AI companies were smart… Actually, let’s put this another way. It’s not so much that they’re not smart as it is that they are not actually interested in selling AI solutions for real people. They want to be able to sell AI, of course, because otherwise, they can’t justify their venture capital funding, but they’re more interested in selling solutions that other companies and the stock market are going to like. But what if someone said they had an AI that could manage all your streaming subscriptions for you? Tell it what shows you want to watch, and it does the rest.

The industry does also seem to be increasingly interested in doing more bundling deals in the future, but bundling only helps if you were already going to pay for those streaming services in the first place. It’s not news, but the entertainment industry famously went from large cable bundles to a la carte purchases to subscription services… and now we’re back to bundles again. The Macalope would not be surprised to soon see the return of something like the TV tuners of old that would let you subscribe to the lower-priced ad tiers and then strip out the ads.

Which is his way of saying that if the state of the entertainment business is getting you down right now, don’t worry. It’ll probably be different again in a couple of years.