Oprah, Spielberg, and Sara Bareilles: Apple’s Foray Into Original Content Has Begun

Apple is here to save the television industry from itself—also the news industry, the video game industry, and maybe, if Oprah’s digital book club really takes off, the publishing industry as well. On Monday, tech’s most self-righteous corporate giant held its latest press event in the Steve Jobs Theater, but instead of debuting Apple Watch bands or new iPhone colors, the company announced a series of subscription services that are meant to extract a little more annual revenue from customers who may not be upgrading their phones as often as they used to. While the two-hour event featured a bevy of A-list celebrities, the number of concrete announcements didn’t quite match the star power. A quick recap:

• A new premium version of Apple News, called Apple News+, will grant customers access to glossy magazines such as The New Yorker, Vogue, and Time, as well as at least two national newspapers, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. The Journal will include only a select number of articles in Apple’s product, and the company didn’t specify how much content other publications will contribute. The service costs $10 per month and is available starting Monday.
• A gaming subscription service, Apple Arcade, will grant customers access to more than 100 games in the App Store, with the biggest IP shown off so far being Sonic Racing and something called Frogger in Toy Town. This will also cost $10 per month.
• A television subscription service, called (wait for it) Apple TV+, will offer original scripted shows, movies, and documentaries from stars like Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Steven Spielberg. The service will debut in the fall but doesn’t yet have a price tag attached.
• Apple will also start selling premium cable channels like HBO and Starz (but not Netflix) in its revamped Apple TV experience. Apple tried to act like this was a big deal, but you can already subscribe to HBO through Amazon, Hulu, or … your cable company
• Apple is partnering with Goldman Sachs to create a credit card integrated with Apple Pay that has no late fees, a generous cashback bonus, and probably requires a ludicrously high credit score. It will debut this summer.

The two-hour event was a typical Apple spectacle of highly stylized product trailers (but no actual movie trailers) that omit fundamental product information, such as price points and release dates. The promotion strategy feels increasingly anachronistic in an era when Netflix can turn shows into viral hits with zero marketing fanfare. But Apple is determined to carve out a business model and production strategy that separates it both from the tech giants it has long competed with and the Hollywood networks and studios it now counts as frenemies. Here are the most important takeaways from Apple’s event:

Apple Intends to Start Its Programming With a Bang

Alison Herman: A full six years ago, Netflix entered the original content ring with a hell of an opening salvo: an hourlong drama from David Fincher and Kevin Spacey, ordered straight to series for multiple seasons without so much as a pilot. Apple TV+—the bare-bones moniker for the future home of the dozens of projects announced, shot, and even locked by the tech giant over the past several years—has its own analog to House of Cards’ flagship: The Morning Show, a behind-the-scenes tug-of-war starring Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston, and Steve Carrell, picked up for two seasons without even a script. Except The Morning Show will also be joined by a televised version of Oprah’s book club, an anthology from Oscar nominees Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, an Amazing Stories revival shepherded by Steven Spielberg, a postapocalyptic fantasy starring Jason Momoa, and more. “It’s not just another streaming service,” argued Apple VP of services Peter Stern. “It is the destination where the world’s greatest storytellers will bring their best ideas to life.”

This is both patently untrue—TV+ is, in fact, a streaming service, entering into a crowded ecosystem of many other streaming services—and an accurate summary of Apple’s approach to making itself a force to be reckoned with in the entertainment sphere. The idea is quality over, or rather in addition to, quantity, an ethos echoed in the emphasis on curation in News+ and the spotlight on challenging, experimental games in Arcade. In terms of what this quality will actually look like, all we got was a 30-second sizzle reel; we learned that iconic blond Witherspoon went (temporarily) brunette, Momoa looks as good in furs as he does shirtless, and … that’s about it. In lieu of real trailers, we got Spielberg-level heavies explaining their current projects via multi-minute sermons to the Cupertino audience, with an Oscar-style “movies!!!” montage thrown in for good measure:

Like Netflix and Amazon before it, Apple is experiencing an awkward transition from one set of industry norms to another. Much as Netflix balances algorithmic findings with pleasing talent and Amazon balances selling dirt-cheap toilet paper with running absurdly expensive Emmy campaigns, Apple must figure out how to steer the Titanic, if the Titanic spent decades building supply chains, toward the town that gave us Titanic. For now, the plan seems to be papering over speed bumps with a steady stream of money and celebrity. That’s more or less how its predecessors did it, too—which may undermine Apple’s claims of a unique product, but also suggests there’s a clear path to success. All that’s left is the content.

Apple Is a Services Company Now

Victor Luckerson: The fact Apple is trying to build iPhone-level hype around a bunch of digital subscriptions is the company’s latest effort to rebrand itself as a services company. iPhone sales are declining in key markets and efforts to build a new must-have gadget, like a driverless car or augmented-reality glasses, have stalled out. So Apple wants to turn its one-and-done customers into loyalists who pay monthly for access to Apple’s ecosystem.

Crucially, though, Apple wants to make sure that its services continue to feed its hardware sales as well. The Apple News app is exclusive to Apple hardware, as is Apple Arcade (Apple TV+ will be available on Smart TVs, Rokus, and Amazon Fire TVs, probably because Hollywood demanded it). Unlike platform-agnostic ecosystems like those from Google or Amazon, Apple’s requires full customer fealty. But the company is still missing an overall services bundle that would actually make a blood oath to Tim Cook worth it. Until there’s an Amazon Prime–type service that includes all of Apple’s various subscriptions along with regular iPhone upgrades, the company’s new services look less like great deals and more like new subs crowding into an already overcrowded market of paywalled content.

There’s a Lot We Don’t Know Yet

Herman: Between the Sara Bareilles concerts and the Big Bird cameos, there’s quite a bit that went unsaid during the unveiling of the Apple event’s highest-profile announcement, TV+. In fact, lingering questions include most of the nuts and bolts many observers were eager to have clarified by Monday’s proceedings. Such as: Exactly when, beyond “early fall,” will this new streaming service launch? And, oh yeah: How much will it cost? How will that price point be incorporated into, and affected by, Apple’s new skinny bundles?

The lingering ambiguity surrounding these basic elements of the TV+ user experience is more than a little frustrating. Monday’s event went long on star power, enlisting everyone from J.J. Abrams to Oprah herself in vouching for the tech company’s ambitions in a brand-new sphere. But how and when customers will interact with Apple’s glitzy programming slate remains mysterious. Will TV+ come out of the gate with a $15 monthly fee, on par with HBO or Netflix, based on the assumption that consumers will intuitively understand the premium value a fleet of Oscar winners will bring to the table? Or will they ease us in with a subsidized rate? Does fall mean back-to-school time or Thanksgiving? All of it is TBA—which, given that the Steve Jobs Theater was filled to the rafters for one giant A, isn’t the most reassuring feeling.

Privacy Is Now a Selling Point

Luckerson: Across its new services, Apple emphasized that privacy would be a main focus. Apple News will recommend articles, but it won’t leverage users’ reading habits to build demographic profiles that can be sold to advertisers. Apple Arcade games won’t have ads or freemium models that exploit people’s compulsive behavior for profit. The new Apple TV service will feature a Kids section has been vetted by curators, a clear dig at the horrifying stuff that is being algorithmically fed to children on YouTube. These efforts place Apple in stark opposition to Facebook and Google, which control the digital ad economy, and to some extent even Amazon, which has been quietly building a robust ads business based on its customers’ buying habits. Not only is this strategy a selling point that will bolster Apple’s customer-centric brand, but it could help protect the company during the regulatory crackdown that the internet giants are facing from governments around the world.

Silicon Valley and Hollywood Are Not a Natural Fit—and Apple Knows It

Herman: One of the most persistent narratives surrounding Apple’s foray of entertainment has been the obvious conflicts between Silicon Valley’s data-centric approach to road-testing ideas and Hollywood’s messier artistic process. Add to that a trillion-dollar, global, family-friendly corporation managing a bunch of storytellers with high-minded creative ideals and you get this schadenfreude-laden Wall Street Journal report from last fall, which paints a picture of clueless corporate suits afraid of the sex and violence required to make a splash in prestige TV.

Though the presentation never addressed these rumors outright, its central narrative seemed designed to head off the nascent concerns. From the souped-up, magazine-centric News+ product to the Arcade hub for paid games to the TV+ military-grade roster, every stage of the event emphasized Apple’s dedication to self-expression and amplifying, rather than modifying, original voices. It’s a canny PR strategy, but also a notable departure from the open-source tenets of the early internet, dominated as it was by pirated music and free apps. Plus: All the kow-towing to the New Yorker’s highbrow cred is well and good, but taking in 50 percent of the proceeds hardly puts Apple’s money where its mouth is—quite the opposite, in fact. All the skepticism surrounding Apple’s pivot to supporting creators remains warranted; that the company is aware of it enough to shape its branding accordingly is what’s noteworthy here.

Was Spielberg’s Netflix Rant Part of an Apple-Backed Conspiracy?

Luckerson: Look, I’m just asking questions. First, Steven Spielberg sparked controversy by saying that movies that appear on streaming services like Netflix without a wide theatrical release don’t deserve Oscars. Now he’s in Cupertino as the centerpiece of Apple’s promotional efforts around its original content plans. Like the rest of us, Spielberg knows that Apple is a corporation targeted at the affluent that is obsessed with the valorization of its brand by tastemakers. There is no company on earth that craves an Oscar more. Spielberg’s only announced Apple project is an anthology series based on his old Amazing Stories television show, but it’s easy to imagine a big-enough check landing the next Spielberg flick on the iPhone screen instead of the silver one. The director is already gushing about “the creative and visionary folks at Apple”—not something you say about a format you’ve dismissed as the home of made-for-TV movies. When Spielberg makes an about-face on the credibility of streaming-exclusive films based on the unique genius of Apple’s creative culture, just remember that this is the company that once got in a “fight” with Taylor Swift over its music streaming service, which got resolved a little too neatly.

An earlier version of this piece referred to Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon as Oscar winners. They were Oscar nominees.