Apple TV Plus | Apple Channels | Future of Streaming?
where they announced a bunch of new products and services,
they announced, let's see, Apple News Plus,
Apple Card, Apple Arcade, Apple TV Channels,
improvements upon, and Apple TV Plus.
There is a ton of stuff to go over with all of that, but today right now we're just gonna concentrate on those last two, Apple TV Channels, and Apple TV Plus,
because those are the most germane to us,
for the last few months on this channel.
So if you like this sort of content,
in part because we know these least about it,
this is, if you've heard about Apple dropping
a billion dollars in the last year on content creation,
this is what they were talking about.
A billion dollars in content creation,
where does that all go?
Well it turns out, here's where it all went.
Really, really big names that
they can use to sell this service.
So what is the service?
Well, that's a little bit tougher question to answer.
It is going to be a streaming service with original content,but is there going to be anything else on
Apple TV Plus?
Is this going to be like a Netflix thing,
where they have all sorts of on-demand content
picked from different sources?
I don't know.
Is there going to be some sort of live TV aspect to it,
competing with Sling TV and DirecTV Now?
I don't know.
Oh, all I do know from this announcement, and this took,
gosh, 45 minutes for them to tell us about what they did,
is that there are several new programs.
These are TV shows, produced and directed by the likes of,
what's the guy's name, Steven Spielberg, they've got Oprah,
they've got Jason Momoa doing a TV show,
they've got all sorts of big name stars,
actors, producers, directors
doing these shows for Apple TV Plus.
Now they didn't give us an official launch date,
I think it was fall, coming up this fall,
so we'll see when the actual launch date is.
The other thing they didn't give us was a price.
Well, I don't know how I feel about that,
I was really looking forward to
how much I would have to pay for this,
but let's just assume that with all these new programs,
and these are high flying programs,
let's assume it's a bit like HBO or Showtime,
where you can expect to pay,
say 15 bucks a month for that service.
It's gonna have to be more than what I would like to pay,
you know, five bucks, eight bucks a month because,
like I said, they paid a billion dollars for this stuff,
so they are going to charge you for it,
and I would imagine they'll charge you
something like HBO rates.
We'll bring more info on that as it comes,
but let's get to Apple TV Channels.
This was, for me, the more interesting announcement.
This is exactly what I was asking for
in the DirecTV video a few weeks ago.
If you go check that out basically what I was saying is,
I want one of two things from a streaming service platform,
one would be a true à la carte,
where I get to pick and choose
which channels I want, which live TV channels I want,
the other would be a platform
that aggregates all of these channels,
all these things together,
and let's me pay for them and watch them all in one place.
And that second option, that is what Apple TV Channels,
gosh I hate these names, that's what that's going for.
And so essentially what it means,
in your Apple TV, if you use an Apple TV,
by the way they're great, I do like them,
but in that Apple TV ecosystem there is a TV app,
and in that app right now it kind of aggregates things,
and it gives you suggestions of things to watch.
They're essentially supercharging that.
And right now they're not saying that
it's going to cost you anything extra, which is great,
but what you can do is use your Apple profile,
your ID that has your credit card info
and all that stuff stored in there
to now say, okay, I want ESPN+, and HBO, and Showtime,
or whatever, you take all those different subscriptions,
and you pay the subscription through the Apple App Store,
and it'll aggregate all that content for you
and show you everything that you can watch.
You can also do that with live TV streaming services
like Hulu with live TV, or what have you.
They didn't say YouTube TV because, well it's Apple,
and they don't play that nice with Google anyway,
so probably not that one.
But if you plug those in,
you can then see everything that's live
right now that's available to you,
everything that's on-demand that's available to you,
through all those apps.
So it is a nice little app that they're creating there,
what I was worried about was that
it would be available only if you use an Apple TV,
which would be annoying
because Apple TV's kind of expensive.
But what they're doing is they're actually
rolling this out for almost,
it looks like almost all smart TVs,
again maybe not those Google platforms,
they suspiciously left those off of their list,
but they're talking about smart TVs from Samsung,
and Sony, and those big name brands,
but then also Amazon Fire TVs and Roku TVs
will have access to this Apple TV Channels app.
So all of us are going to be able,
well all of us who use those,
are going to be able to enjoy this
aggregating service if we so choose.
I'm just not enough in the Apple ecosystem
to say that this is super duper exciting to me,
but I like the direction quite a bit,
I am always weary about getting some new product
or service from Apple,
'cause one you step into that ecosystem
they really get you, they want you to buy more,
and more, and more Apple stuff.
But with this direction,
hopefully we would see some other companies,
some other brands, doing something similar.
I would like to see Roku take that one step further
from the platform they currently have
to something that looks an awful lot like this.
It would be really nice.
Anyway, that's about what we have
from the announcements today,
we'll keep an eye out on what comes up down the line,
but that's what we're looking at.
What we have, again,
Apple News which I mentioned at the beginning,
they announced a $10 price on that per month,
Apple Card I assume won't have a monthly cost,
they do have Apple Arcade,
which is a video gaming service,
that will have a monthly cost,
I would assume ten or 15 bucks a month,
Apple TV Channels will be free to use as far as I can tell,
and Apple TV Plus, again we don't have a price,
I would assume 15 bucks, give or take five.
But with all that, you add in Apple Music,
which you already might have, that's ten bucks a month,
essentially they're putting more services out there
that they're hoping to get that
monthly subscription from you on there.
So they could be getting quite a bit
of our dollars every month,
we'll see exactly what we all pay for.
Is everybody excited for this?
I'm not sure.
Like I said, I do like the Apple TV Channels concept,
the Apple TV Plus with all the original content,
we'll see, we'll see how it goes.
But I'm more excited for the other one,
as for the rest of the world,
I can't speak for ya because this news was just announced,
but I can tell you that as soon as
all these announcements were made
Apple's stock started trading a little bit down,
they're down about 2%,
not that maybe you care about that too much,
but it is kind of an indication of how
investors are feeling about this at the moment.
So we'll see where it all goes,
hopefully it's all great, I don't know.
I have my doubts, but I'm also kind of excited
for at least one of these things.
So if this is helpful to you,