It’s Time For Apple To Kill Apple TV+

Apple TV+ is DOA, and the sooner Apple realizes it, the sooner the company will stop wasting billions of dollars chasing failure.

Apple captured magic in a bottle in the media industry once before, when it achieved first-mover advantage with an integrated hardware-software-services business model for music.

But even with that strategic early-innovator advantage, Apple didn’t try to be a music label.

Now, with 25th mover advantage firmly in its not-so-hip pocket, Apple is trying to present Apple TV (the app, not the service or the device) as a hub for all your video entertainment, whether it’s on Netflix or Amazon Prime or rented from iTunes or — very infrequently — streamed from Apple TV+ (the service, not the app or the hardware).

And yes, this is confusing, because Apple TV is hardware: a set-top box. Apple TV is an app on iPhones and Macs. And Apple TV+ is a paid service with Apple-exclusive video entertainment on multiple platforms, including Roku.

(The struggle is real, Apple naming and branding execs are not-so-subtly telling us.)

The hub idea isn’t horrible, although it comes with all kinds of privacy concerns: everything you watch on all services is visible in Apple TV to anyone who turns on your TV.

But the plan for Apple to become a player in streaming media?

The idea that Apple could be the next Netflix?

That seems like it will be as long-lived as the exceedingly short period of time my family spent watching See, one of the the biggest Apple-exclusive shows on Apple TV+. We stopped watching when the blind homicidal queen started prayerfully masturbating to the gods in the bowels of an ancient hydroelectricity generation facility.

(I would say you can’t make this stuff up, but clearly someone actually did.)

After initially planning to spend $1 billion on original content, Apple’s investment is now north of $6 billion. And, while it’s true that Apple’s mobile hardware empire throws off so much cash executives hardly know what to do with it all, there would seem to be more obvious ways of flushing it down the toilet.

Or maybe even — shockers — investing it.

Such as, for instance, buying Sonos and making HomePod relevant.

Or, perhaps, fixing the dumpster fire that is Apple’s smart home strategy, which has approximately zero Apple-branded products to Google’s multiple and Amazon’s mega-multiple — all of which just work, which used to be Apple’s calling card — and a vaguely skeumorphic hub app, Home, which is confusing at best, hard to use at not-so-best, and phone-throwingly-frustrating at worst.

The problem is simple.

Apple’s 5-6 new shows on Apple TV+ can’t compete with Netflix, which released more original movies and shows in 2019 than the entire TV industry in 2005. Or Disney, which has an archive of cultural treasure going back almost a century, and a seemingly inexhaustible lode of Star Wars lust that the company keeps mining and mining and mining, usually in the same spot and usually with the same results (not too innovative but tremendously financially successful).

And we haven’t even talked about Hulu or HBO or Quibi or Peacock yet.

Apple: you are amazing at hardware. You are one of the best in the world at combining hardware, software, and services.

You are not a media production powerhouse.