So apparently, Eddy Cue thinks Apple needs to focus more on streaming and advertising. There’s an explicit mention of advertising as being an “opportunity for revenue growth”. 
So how shall one not be concerned about this? 
Sigh, don’t have to buy into it.
Apple has been very successfully selling ads on the App Store for years. But they never had anything resembling success with any other attempts to dip their feet into the ad sales water. In fact, every attempt has been rather disastrous. But since they recently bought the rights to Friday Night Baseball, they now have a very competitive and highly successful venue, and there has been a lot of press about Apple negotiating with other sports leagues. And since live sports programming conveniently has lots of down time during games, commercials can be easily slugged in. Sports fans are used to commercials and don’t terribly mind them if they don’t interrupt games.
At the moment, TV+ doesn’t have much, if anything, of a compelling audience and story that would bring in enough dough that would pump up an even barely negligible advertising pipeline. And they don’t have anything resembling the amount and variety of content that Netflix, Disney, Hulu, etc. have. Maybe offering a free commercial tier alongside a paid non commercial tier would work for Apple if they can develop enough compelling content. But sports will probably be a very successful toe in the door.
I don’t know what the specifics will be, but I personally think ad-sponsored streaming video is a good idea.
Right now, my family subscribes to four streaming services (Netflix, Hulu, Disney+ and Amazon, although Amazon is mostly a free bonus, since we primarily use Prime for the free shipping). We really don’t want to pay for any more, but every service has exclusive shows that we’d like to see.
I would like to see a service with a tiered subscription model. Identical content, provided with differing amounts of ads for different prices. Something like:
- Free tier. Broadcast quantities of ads (25% of time - 15 minutes of ads per hour)
- Low cost. For $6/mo or less, offer the content with less advertising. Maybe 10% - 6 minutes of ads per hour.
- Higher cost. For the prices the channels typically charge today ($8-15/mo), provide the content without any advertising.
This way people like me can quickly create a free account and watch must-see shows without creating new financial obligations and those who would rather pay than view ads are free to do so.
Peacock is using a model similar to my idea, although it’s not ideal, since the free tier doesn’t have access to all on-demand content. Their free tier provides a large selection (“40,000+ hours”, whatever that means) of on-demand content and a few dozen channels (which live-stream programming like traditional TV channels), with ads. For $5/mo, it ads get additional (“all 60,000+ hours”) on-demand content, live sports and events and next-day viewing of NBC/Bravo broadcast content. For $10/mo they remove most of the ads and offer off-line viewing.
2 Likes
Yeah, no interest here in any of that. If I want to really see a show, I’ll buy it. Pay once. Done. Just the way it used to be. I don’t want ads, subscriptions, or any other attempts at locking me in or twisting my arm. Refuse to sell shows on a pay-per-view basis, no sale here. Simple really.