First impressions matter. Remember carpool karaoke?
I thought that App show disaster was their first impression? That was the first truly original content, no? Yikes that it exists either way.
I’ve got no concern or worries about being wrong, as stranger things have certainly happened, but to me, this is Apple and Tim Cook at their most out of touch best, and that’s if they did this 3-4 years ago. Now they’re late to the party when the masses are transitioning into the subscription burnout era and they’re also still very out of touch and kissing up to the stars of yesterday in a world where “celebrity” has less and less meaning and relevance.
And I say all this under my personal suspicion that this will somehow all be “free” (-ish) or part of something many of us are already paying for (Apple Music/iPhone Upgrade Program).
At $9.99 with dated names and unproven content and little of it at that? I mean, come on, more power to them for spending their money how they want, but you’ve got to have some intense optimism to see this working out well in reality. It’s not about being a naysayer or having to eat crow or some malarkey, it’s simply that Apple has a tremendous amount to prove before anyone should be even remotely interested in paying for this. Even if every program is as close to empirically great as entertainment can be, this is still going to be an incredibly hard sell at any price, even free. That’s not being a naysayer; that’s being completely realistic with where we’re at in the streaming world.
It won’t be a disaster because it’s not the sort of thing that breaks a company as big as Apple. They can afford a multi-billion dollar level mistake. But I think it is likely to be an embarrassment, and it’s not likely to end up being a good look for Tim Cook in the coming years.
Random separate thought: I’m also going to venture to guess this won’t be nearly as easy to share as Netflix/Hulu/HBO/etc. are. How many people do we all knowing sharing their logins? If this is tied to Apple IDs on a system level which I’m sure it will be, no one will be sharing logins as it likely will make a mess of device data and I’d venture to guess most are more careful with Apple ID or iCloud IDs. And the shareable aspect does matter because it’s a big part of what hooks people on the content and oftentimes leads to people eventually becoming paying customers, and it also plays into advertising revenue you’d get from product placement arrangements. I’m wildly curious to see how this is all positioned when finally unveiled, and I still suspect it will somehow be “free” for many Apple users, because anything other than that simply sounds ludicrous in 2019 for what this is shaping up to be.
Who’s paying for Prime Video without Prime Shipping? Not many people.
