Apple has been a busy little corporation, and is rumoured to be plotting sneaky acquisitions and service bundle schemes behind the scenes. The planned streaming service could bundle streaming video with a subscription to magazines, Apple Music, and iCloud storage.
According to multiple sources, Apple wants to create a single subscription offering that would encompass its original TV shows, music service and magazine articles. This after a few acquisitions by the corporation raised a few flags, and people started to put the pieces together. The move comes at the perfect time for streaming — with most major TV networks rolling out their own streaming services to compete with Netflix, and some TV subscription services even failing to keep up with the major shift to online.
Apple News
Apple acquired an online news service called Texture in March this year, which offers more than 200 magazines for $9.99/month (R140 at the time of writing). This, combined with Apple’s own in-house news team, would give them credibility and a large amount of control over the media ecosystem.
The new content will likely come to Apple News within the next year, and is expected to require a subscription, with a percentage of the revenue going directly to the news contributors/publishers. It’s an interesting move, as many people consider news a commodity they shouldn’t have to pay for, but if Apple can deliver the right calibre of content and balance political interests while avoiding the dreaded “fake news”, users might be happy to pay.
Apple Movies
It has a strange ring to it, but we’re sure Apple is working on their own video content for a streaming service due to launch in the next year too. The company has already begun releasing its own projects: it released Planet of the Apps and Carpool Karaoke on Apple Music (or iTunes) in 2017, but a big rollout of original content could follow as early as March 2019.
And they are ready for it — the company has started developing a large lineup of original projects. So far, they have signed a multi-year deal with Oprah Winfrey to develop new shows, ordered a pair of children’s shows from the creators of Sesame Street, a reboot of the science fiction anthology show Amazing Stories, a Hunger Games-style dystopian series called See, a series from La La Land director Damien Chazelle, a thriller series from M. Night Shyamalan, a space drama from Battlestar Galactica creator Ron Moore, a drama about a morning show starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston, and an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s classic science fiction novel Foundation. There are even reports that they’re working to acquire the rights to an animated film.
With an impressive lineup, Apple is bound to create great content, but will it be enough? To compete with the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime it may need more than that… of course, it may well have other things up its crisp, white sleeves.
How’s it going to work?
This is just speculation based on some strange activity from Apple’s side, but it’s clear that they are indeed planning on either a big launch of a bundled service, or a few smaller services. Our guess is that it will look a lot like the Apple Music platform, but if it turns out to offer a truly comprehensive service, it will likely be redesigned to suit a range of screens.
Apple News is nothing new (although we don’t have access to it in South Africa), and this, paired with a a magazine service, their current iTunes and Apple Music and a video streaming service could be one of the first quality bundled services available.
It would be something like the Kwesé Play, but with the Apple TV box, and with Apple-only services. This is probably their master plan — to keep the Apple ecosystem optimal and make it the only place to go for all your streaming needs — whatever they may be.
Source: The Verge