Roger Fingas
Apple TV+, launching this fall, will emphasize a small but high-quality lineup, said Apple's software and services VP Eddy Cue in a recent interview.
The company is working on "creating the best" content rather than "creating the most," Cue told The Times this week. He nevertheless acknowledged that Netflix has succeeded with a non-stop flow of new content, such that viewers can even complain about the barrage making it hard to choose.
"Their motto is to create a lot of content so there's always something for you to watch, and it's working really well," Cue remarked. "There's nothing wrong with that model, but it's not our model."
Apple is preparing an assortment of original shows for launch, with high-profile creators like Steven Spielberg, J.J. Abrams, and Oprah Winfrey already lined up. It's not yet clear however if the company will have any third-party shows or movies, and first-party video so far appears aimed at U.S. audiences, whereas Netflix targets cultures worldwide. Apple's launch regions are still unannounced.
Cue separately admitted that Apple had to recruit former Sony executives Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg to take charge of Apple TV+ content given the company's blindspots.
"Look, we don't know a lot about television other than we are big consumers of it, but that doesn't quite qualify you as an expert by any means," he said. "The thing that we're smart about is when we don't know about something we want to get into, we go and find the best people for it."
More details about Apple's plans, such as pricing, are likely at an iPhone event in September. To prepare the company is overhauling its "TV" app and bringing it to third-party platforms, such as Roku and Amazon streamers.
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24 Comments
Hopefully they have learned from the 'Planet of the apps' disaster.
Netflix’s model is also treat the user like a piece-of-meat-to-raise-their-share-price. Originally, Netflix’s streaming model at $6.99 as the only plan with no contract and no ads was a good offering, this is what built the service up, but now they have a tiered plan that puts limits on cheaper plans, they’ve raised prices a few times, and they’ve lost a lot of licensed content, but have replaced it mostly with much of their own garbage shows. And in making this barrage of crap show they fit us, their users with the bill (users who built their service up). Worse content for much more money, isn’t why people joined Netflix originally.
Other problems with Netflix: crap at making apps, deliberately hiding and getting rid of useful settings, navigation is a mess, rearranging your list every time you enter an item on the list—this is to get you watching for longer, it doesn’t in any way value a user’s experience or time, it merely sees our time as their commodity to abuse for profit—and it makes trying to go peruse your list in a conscious manner, like some kind of nightmare in futility.
Rest assured Netflix doesn’t give two shits about their users. You’d think with all of the competition coming up around them they’d be caring more about us, not less.
Another horrible trend for them is to stretch out fictional and documentary shows into many more episodes than is required—once again, not to give you a better experience, but just to keep you watching for longer. I could name off-hand several times they have done this recently. Many people are fooled by this, but not me. Regardless of what Disney or Apple come out with this year, I’ll most likely leave Netflix this year.
Man, they’re really milking the moon landing this year.
On one hand, having a lot of content allows you to gauge your users' interests and demographics. On the other hand, you need that data to focus on "quality" for your audience. My question is how does Apple determine what's "quality" if they don't really provide much content to gauge its users? It's not binary.