> While Apple has found success in television with shows like Ted Lasso and Killers of the Flower Moon, it has struggled to compete in the highly competitive streaming market.
An old post now, but still a relevant point. If memory serves, Disney is the only streaming service besides Netflix to have turned a profit in its last quarterly report.
Netflix is the only consistently profitable streaming service now worldwide because they have so many subscribers. They stumbled badly by waiting to bring an ad-supported tier to the service and resisted it for too long, but once they did it has driven profits. That and cracking down on account sharing have really helped their bottom line.
I went over all of Netflix's advantages in a longish (and attempted humorous) article I wrote in October of 2022, and they have implemented those plans well.
So Apple is finding out the same things all the streaming companies have, contents costs are very high, customer acquisition and retention are expensive and difficult, and no number of awards guarantee success for any film company, they're nearly irrelevant.
I think Apple just overstepped and got too ambitious in their plans for streaming, spending too much on original content creation. They've used Apple TV+ to drive sales of their Apple One bundles and to a lesser degree, the Apple TV streaming box.
I'm glad they're finally reining in the costs. They had the money to burn on it, but at some point enough is enough. Netflix started doing that years ago by canceling critically well-received series with small audiences after one or two seasons, without warning or resolution of their plots. |
