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Apple TV+ Curbs Costs After Expensive Projects Fail to Capture Viewers

WarmWinterHat said:
The Comcast merger was several years, and administrations, ago and I don't think it would fly today. The current government (republican and democrat) is much less likely to allow it.
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I would like to believe that, but it's just a different set of butts in the regulatory capture seat.

And it doesn't matter how long ago it was. The fact that something that egregious was allowed to happen is unbelievable. And that was under Obama, by the way. So there's no indication Trump, Biden 2.0, or whoever is next would do any better. And there's certainly no hope that it's getting better in the un-foreseeable future.

And to steer this back on topic so it doesn't get deleted for being a political post, it might actually be good to have some consolidation in streaming. We don't need the entire companies to merge. We just need all the content owners to stop siloing their content.
 
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The only reason that I have Apple TV+ is that it is part of my Apple One package. The only show that I have watched all episodes is Ted Lasso (which I thought was excellent). Apple don't have any 'pillar' franchises like Star Wars / Star Trek or Marvel. The trouble is the shows are too 'safe' as they have to demonstrate Apple's values. Shows Like "Game of Thrones" got big for a reason. Oh and yes too much product placement in the shows. I had hopes for "Foundation" but I fell asleep watching the first couple of episodes. I do agree that they need to spend less money on household name actors, offer shows that are less safe, with better writing, if they want to succeed.
 
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jazzzyJeff said:
People get Netflix not cuz of their “brilliant” originals but cuz of their licensing of content from other studios. Their originals are as crappy as any other streaming service’s these days.
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Which lends further creedence to my argument that there needs to be one company that just streams the video, and the content producers need to use it for distribution. I don't know how the economic model would work, it sounds downright socialist, but everything is only going to get worse if the content owners are also the exclusive distributors.

That's what led us to this crappy world of fifty streaming services with 1-2 good shows apiece.
 
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playtech1 said:
It's amazing to me how much is charged these days for such little content. A show might only have 8 to 10 episodes, multi-year breaks between seasons, and the streamers simply don't produce that many shows. I appreciate quality over quantity, but you still need a critical mass of stuff to watch to justify the subscription. The lack of pressure on streamers to fill a daily time schedule and need for a standout show to encourage subs has made them focus a bit too much on the big budget productions and left the cupboard looking bare once a viewer has watched that show. It's also hard to get invested when you know cancellation or delay is now the norm. I'm not surprised at the subscriber churn.
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I’m a fan of The West Wing. It ran 7 seasons. Every season had at least 20 episodes. LA Law was similar. ER ran 15 seasons with 20+ episodes per season. The old soap opera Dallas ran 14 seasons and the number of episodes per season was 25+. Now most shows are more like a mini-series with 6-8 episodes. I’ll take a longer running series even if some of the episodes are filler. Is the issue here that actors won’t commit? Or does the public now have zero attention span and they won’t watch something they can’t binge over a few hours on a weekend?
 
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How the f do you manage to make an episode of Severance cost 20 million bucks lol

I’m also not sure that Apple realizes that only 4% of the world population is American so focusing everything on old Hollywood stars and American sports leagues makes it unappealing to most people on Earth.

Anyway, never had TV+ because I don’t need another 10 buck/month service.

Also, Apple has unlimited money and it’s easier to download some shows than it is to make sure you don’t pay for more than 1 month per year and to keep track of when every show comes out manually so I’m not really motivated to go out of my way to pay for the content either. For example there is 3-4 years between seasons of Severance? And 2-3 between seasons of Foundation? Yeah, how are people supposed to sync up their subscriptions to tricks like that? Oh, they’re not and just supposed to pay 120 bucks a year? No, thanks.

How do you share Apple TV+ anyway? I either have to give people my Apple ID login information or get them an Apple device so they can make a proper account for themselves? No, thanks.

And why do the trials only work in the USA and UK?😾
 
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ILoveCalvinCool said:
Call me crazy but I want television from Apple about as much as a I want a laptop from Disney. Why are they even doing this? Does Microsoft have a TV network?
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They did. MSNBC was a Microsoft and NBC partnership from 1996 to 2005ish.

Kay_Ess said:
How do you share Apple TV+ anyway? I either have to give people my Apple ID login information or get them an Apple device so they can make a proper account for themselves? No, thanks.
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That brings up another question. Can you have an Apple TV+ profile without an Apple account? I can go into Prime or Netflix and just create a profile right from my Roku. Why can't I do that with Apple TV+?
 
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Apple TV+‘s biggest issue is investing in big name stars who haven’t truly been big for 10-20 years. There has been no real attempt to attract younger audiences to the service. You would think that with how good Apple is with music they would make some real investments in concert films and the like. Their niche seems to be appealing to the upper classes and not making anything for a wider audience.

I thought Apple made some mistakes in not going after another studio for their catalog and IPs. Paramount would be a decent fit in some ways, with their ownership of Star Trek and something like Mission Impossible or Transformers. Franchises bring in audiences that may not otherwise buy into Apple TV+.
 
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Huge band of brothers fan. Strongly disliked The Pacific. Masters of the Air? Could have been great. Good visuals, decent cast except for the god awful Elvis lead that could have been replaced with a cardboard cutout, interesting story but horrible script. First episode should have established the core characters, given us a reason to care when they went into battle and some didn’t return. Hell given us the ability to tell one from the other for Pete’s sake. But no, they chose to waste 250m on a meandering plot that wasted three episodes in a POW camp and no payoff instead of air battles. Maybe it was for budget reasons, maybe the writers wanted to tell a different story than the one they were hired for, but regardless MotA was a disappointing end to the Playtone war trilogy that didn’t need to be.
 
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Deine Mudda said:
Didn’t expect that.
Ted Lasso and Severance were top tier shows but Severance Season 2 took too long in my eyes. Looking forward to that soon.
Otherwise all shows looked fantastic aesthetically.
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You can watch those one month, cancel subscription the next one. It’s not a case of quality over quantity, but you have to have a certain depth in your catalog.
 
Outside of the Apple ecosystem, no one gives a crap. Inside the Apple ecosystem, most people only have an iPhone and they aren’t paying for a streaming service for that.

What did they expect? It’s a fairly niche proposition still.
 
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The only two good shows I'd even consider going back to watching again are Ted Lasso and Shrinking.
For All Mankind was good for a season or two and done. And I couldn't get myself to finish Presumed Innocent despite being a huge JG fan.

Don't even get me started on Netflix originals. They've got the highest percentage of crappy originals in the past 10 years. Couldn't even think of one good one.

If ATV+ wants to attract more viewers then they gotta start licensing content from other studios. It baffled me from the start how they even thought they could gain any traction based purely on Originals. I'm no expert and even I knew that was doomed from the start.
 
Masters Of The Air suffered from bad casting - Austin Butler slipping into Elvis voice was horribly distracting, and casting him didn’t let leave them enough money to cast people actually from NY to speak in scents and instead used british actors? just a **** show.

It’s like Star Wars prequels vs the OG trilogy, you can’t describe what a character’s motivations or anything - Band Of Brothers you had archetypes and understood every member in Easy Company.
 
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James_C said:
I had hopes for "Foundation" but I fell asleep watching the first couple of episodes.
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Foundation was the most disappointing show on Apple TV+ for me. I don’t mind adaptations of books that make changes to the original, but they have to stay in the “spirit” of the book or else I start to tune out. The Foundation writers decided they were better writers than Isaac Asimov and created a boring show that is very far from Asimov’s vision.
 
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Their problem is not quality it’s quantity. Netflix has a lot to choose from so you tend to want to look there.
 
I think the issue that Apple and every other streaming service has is that the seasons they're producing are far too short and have gaps between them that are way too long.

Historically, having a season only be 12-16 episodes would have been considered short. Sometime around ~2018 things changed and a season of that length would now be considered long, with most seasons being 8-12 episodes long now. If these services want to succeed, they need to return to the standard of 20-26 episodes per season. The other issue is that shows often take over a year break between seasons.

The issue with having seasons be just 8-12 episodes long is that I can sign up for a week long trial, watch the latest season of your one or two shows I'm interested in, then cancel. By the time the next season comes out ~2 years later, I'm eligible for another week long free trial.

Not every episode needs to be amazing. Good is good enough. Not every episode needs to be integral to a season long plot arc. It's OK to have quirky episodes that just explore one or two characters in depth and ignore the rest of the cast (practically, shows do that to save cost, but really, it ends up adding a lot of depth/richness to the universe/series... and it also makes it a lot harder to binge an entire season in a one week trial period.)

Really, focus on producing ~90 minutes of content (~2 episodes) for every show every month.
 
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I did watch Foundation (well I'm in season 2 at the moment). The production value is "ok", but the writing sometimes is really just bad, as is some of the acting (some of it is pretty good though).

I think they have the same issues as Disney and Hollywood have... trying to milk established franchises without really understanding what they are about, mixed with forced diversity for diversity's sake. This just results in a product that isn't fun to watch, sorry.
 
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newdeal said:
original content is great but honestly if they want to bring in eyeballs they should just buy a franchise like Disney did with Marvel and Star Wars. Or just buy Disney all together. I mean they could get controlling interest in Disney with a hostile takeover for like 90 billion and they already pissed away 20 billion on content people didn't really care about
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I thought a good idea for Apple would be to make a deal with Disney to make Disney movies. In this modern movie landscape it might make sense for Disney to get out of the business of making content and instead become an IP warehouse, licensing out characters for other studios to make. Apple/Disney is a good combination that would give Apple the movie and TV content they crave, while Disney can focus more on cruises and theme parks.
 
komuh said:
Maybe making stuff people want to watch while also stopping overspending on Hollywood cliché shows will bring some viewers to platform.

Why should i waste time of some boring Morning Show while I can watch House of Dragons or other top tier TV show for less money.

*(Maybe just buy HBO for this billions that were spend on crappy Apple shows to capture some viewer-base and let them <HBO> create shows for you was the move. Right now there are like 3/4 TV shows worth watching on Apple TV why should people waste time on boring, repetitive and copy-paste titles?)
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HBO purchase would’ve been great… 7 or 8 years ago. Apple was late to the streaming party and should never have entered the streaming wars. It is Tim and Eddy’s silly vanity project and it has lost billion for shareholders.

Most shows are lackluster which is why I unsubscribed and apparently most subscribers aren't watching either.
 
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