Apple TV+ library is also incredibly small -- there's little excuse to go back and see what new shows are in there because there usually aren't any.
I wonder how many people are burnt out on dramas that have 8-10 episode seasons, end on a cliff hanger, and you have to wait 1-2 years for the next season. At this point, I've just stopped watching any series that isn't "done" regardless of the streaming service.
Whatever the reason may be, the article outlines a few possibilities, I do agree there is a ton of great content on Apple TV+ that people are sleeping on. I recently watched "The Morning Show", "For All Mankind", and "Presumed Innocent." All were absolutely incredible shows, and none of my friends had heard of them (people who are usually very up to date with shows) furthering that their marketing is not the best for their tv content. Ted Lasso seems to be the only show of theirs that I've felt like broke through all the noise and is most widely known.
However, I do think they have been marketing their movies a lot better. One the new movies "Wolfs" with Brad Pitt, and George Clooney had billboards all over my city. I know many people that did watch that the first week it came out.
> “If you’re a fan of a show on Apple TV,” says Ray, “you have this fear that it’s not being appreciated, it’s not being seen, and you have to tell people about it because the platform itself isn’t going to do it.”
I don't know but Frog and Toad is one of my two year olds favorite shows, as is If You Give a Mouse a Cookie on Amazon. Both based on books, both really well done in my opinion.
Ted Lasso, For All Mankind, and maybe Severance aside, I'm not sure if there's much mass market awareness of Apple TV+ shows. But I'm also uncertain whether any of the streaming services aside from Netflix, Amazon Prime, (HBO) Max, Disney+, and maybe Hulu via brands like FX are able to successfully market their original content. Paramount+ maybe via Star Trek and the one-man empire that is Taylor Sheridan and his Sheridanverse (the Yellowstoneverse?), but that seems like a more limited IP stable than Disney's. There's a lot of noise, a lot of subscription fees, and a lot of losers. Apple might've produced Killers of the Flower Moon and slapped their name on Coda, but they're in a completely saturated and user-fatigued market.
This article touched on a point that I feel is very relevant: unexpected show cancellations, apparently now happening for Apple TV+, as well.
Netflix and Disney+ trained me to not even watch a show until it's concluded because it could get cancelled and I don't want to invest my small amount of free time on entertainment that might not even finish. It does produce a self-fulfilling prophecy where people with the same mindset as me on this do the same, and then the rating for something I (and probably they) are interested in aren't high enough and it gets cancelled.
What should worry them, though, is that it also led to the final step for them; I cancelled my Netflix and Disney+ subscriptions with no intention of renewing them around a year ago. The end result is that "TV series"-style shows are effectively dead to me; I've shifted my time on them mostly to novels (that are basically behind-the-curve on this trend, hopefully forever), followed by single-player video games, and finally movies. (Why didn't movies take the first slot? Because I'm only willing/able to give 30-60 minutes of continuous time to entertainment most of the time, and it's very unsatisfying to pause a movie to resume later.)
The continuous, immediate feedback on series performance coupled with a reputation of acting on that feedback immediately is killing the traditional television medium.
On top of all of that, Apple TV+ has the added albatross of requiring their hardware for the shows, as if they were somehow a siren song to get people more tightly nestled into their ecosystem, and therefore dooming their shows to failure, at least amongst people who don't want to pay for overpriced hardware running software of degrading quality over the years (I switched to Linux in 2016 because it was more reliable than my MacBook Air; being better than Windows isn't good enough anymore, especially when Linux has a greater catalog of software these days).
The needs of Apple, Inc weigh on their Apple TV division, they don't help it, and the sins of the streaming services against actually finishing a story further increase the trust deficit with Apple TV+. No amount of marketing is going to turn that around.
The walled garden certainly keeps me out of the apple ecosystem. I love MacOS but I don't want to pay a premium for vendor lock-in and I infer that most (if not all) apple products are double-edged in that manner.
They also made a massive deal with MLS that led to Messi coming to the US, and they've done a terrible job of getting an mainstream attention for that, even though it's a _great_ viewing experience -- you can watch every game, including 4 games at the same time if you want, and rewatch them whenever you want and the production quality is decent.
If nothing else, they should be doing a full court press to get newspapers and ESPN etc to increase their coverage of MLS, even the Miami Herald is barely covering soccer and Miami is full of soccer fans and the team just set the all time single season points record and has one of the greatest athletes of all time on the field.
I will get roasted for this, but I enjoyed Foundation. Decent sci-fi with some cool visuals and interesting concepts. It just had nothing to do with the actual books.
Maybe Apple should hold a yearly event building hype for their new and ongoing shows. That's by far spots Apple's best marketing channel for every other product they have
From my limited experience with Apple TV (Master of the Air and whatever that terrible Nasa one was) they seem to suffer from the same problem as most throw away TV shows on the streaming services - They lack writers who know anything about the subject matter and they couldn't care less about attention to detail.
They attempt to cash in on the emotional value of these dramatic events without doing the legwork required to do it properly and so it falls flat upon its face.
Apple TV+, Apple Card, Apple News+, and Apple Arcade where all launched there. All have been, for Apple's size and scale, business debacles. Apple TV+'s debacles are well documented in this post, Apple Card is in the news today for incompetence (and has lost billions from Goldman Sachs, and has never launched outside the US), Apple News+ is doing okay with 19 million subscribers, and Apple Arcade has caused no shortage of public publisher ire (#1).
Edit for #1:
Apple Arcade has been a dumpster fire on the backend...
Apple Card doesn’t seem like a loss for Apple and customers however. Just Goldman Sachs. Though it does seem like Apple may have given GS overly optimistic data.
Apple Arcade from a user standpoint seems okay. (I have only played two games from it, but keep the subscription for other family members).
Apple TV I forget about, even though I have enjoyed some great content on it.
News, while I have it, I have never used. Same with Apple Music. (Which I think is in the same bundle of things).
Wonder what's the most dispensable Apple service. I'd guess either Apple News or Apple Fitness+. I don't think these Apple One services are chipping away hugely from Apple's bottom line, but it almost feels a little like a retread of the '90s when they were making everything from the Newton to printers to the Pippin. At least software services are cheaper to build than real gear!
I agree that Apple isn't great about marketing it's shows, but part of the issue is that their shows just aren't that good. I imagine if you're into the Apple ecosystem, you probably get ads for them, but from the outside, it's crickets. I subscribed literally for Ted Lasso and have debated canceling every month since I finished it.
I agree that Severance was good, but it came out in 2022, and the next season isn't coming out until 2025. Shrinking is another I like, but it came out in early 2023 and just started season 2 this month. I wanted to like Silo, having read the books, but something from the trailer just makes it seem off. I'll probably get around to watching it eventually assuming I don't cancel soon. The others don't appeal to me.
I think if you're ok watching the content weekly and only watch an hour or two, if feels like there is content there, but if you binge like most people who stream do, there is hardly anything there. Most people would probably be better off to subscribe for a month or two a year and cancel the rest of the time.
> "...but part of the issue is that their shows just aren't that good..."
Hard disagree from a personal view. Also statistically, I don't think you can strongly claim this since many of their shows have lots of awards if you go off that metric. I haven't done the calculations but I would guess that their content to award ratio is even higher than many other networks.
>I haven't done the calculations but I would guess that their content to award ratio is even higher than many other networks.
That is probably true, but only because they have so little content overall. It is nice that it's not choke full of low budget reality nonsense and foreign stuff, but they also have basically none of the back catalog of content that other services have.
Really hard to agree with this. The shows I've enjoyed most recently are primarily on Apple. Slow Horses, Ted Lasso, Severance, Silo, Dark Matter, Foundation. And, unlike Netflix, Apple seems willing to bring back well regarded shows for a second season, instead of canceling for something new.
There's a popular if snarky narrative that Ted Lasso started out as a straightforward comedy and then became too enraptured with character trauma-drama schmaltz. When The Bear got more focused on each character's struggles in season 2, people mocked it by likening it to Ted Lasso.
>When The Bear got more focused on each character's struggles in season 2
Honestly, that seems to be part of the playbook for almost every show now. I wonder if people just didn't notice it much until the Bear or Ted Lasso, or maybe just because it's more of an abrupt departure from the main story line in those shows instead of just being a b-plot part of a normal episode.
I agree that Severance was good. I suppose they'll come out with a new season right about the time I think about canceling again. I have also been watching Shrinking, but it's not really enough to keep me on the platform. Apple's content seems to be getting well known actors and then putting them into random shows and hoping that people will find out about them via word of mouth or something. There is also basically no back catalog worth watching like there is with other streaming services.
What content? They have almost none. Granted with the segmentation in the streaming market, none of the big players have much going on, but at least you can usually find something to watch on the others. Once you catch up with the 2 or 3 interesting ones on Apple Tv, there is basically nothing to watch.
This includes movies, but browsing their "originals" list, so far I (or my wife) have enjoyed (in no particular order):
Slow Horses
Lessons in Chemistry
Severance
Ted Lasso
Shrinking
Mythic Quest
Roar
CODA
The Problem with John Stewart
And we are looking forward to checking out, in no particular order:
Palm Royale
For All Mankind
Criminal Record
Killers of the Flower Moon
Foundation
Strange Planet
The Morning Show
Greyhound
They're not all knockout hits. Overall we just feel safer trying something new there. If we don't like it, it's usually just because it's not for us, and less because it feels like an algorithmic, soulless cash grab.
They have much less content, but if you value quality over quantity, I don't think that's an issue.
When I look at the Apple TV+ catalog, I can see myself giving an honest shake to _most_ of their content. I simply can't say the same for other services. I understand why they are flooding the zone if they have the resources, but there's a finite amount of content one human can watch.
If Apple releases 50 shows and 80% are up my alley, I get the same amount of enjoyable content as Netflix releasing 400 shows but only 10% are worth my time.
I think my issue is that it's not 80% up my alley. I see a bunch of decent looking shows that are probably good for their audience, I'm just not their audience. But even for stuff where I'm their audience, they often feel to be lacking something.
Apple has always been kind of not great at marketing, simply because their attitude has always been "the product markets itself."
That isn't to say they don't, it's just a cultural attitude inside the company. It's a crying shame because their content teams have obviously great taste and are willing to experiment, and they must be pulling their hair out over this, but yeah – AAPL should not only do more and better marketing, but consider licensing their content out in a limited fashion to draw people in, especially if they're going to maintain 'the product markets itself' – I can still buy iPods in BEst Buy, for an example.
People WANT apple to succeed on this content front. The Apple Vision program especially would benefit from high quality content, well-marketed, especially to drive adoption and thus reduce cost; amazing immersive/interactive content is the killer app for AR/VR if you ask me.
Let silly Zuck make dumb avatars and fake lowbrow games, if I'm going to project content directly onto my eyeballs, let it be Oscar-worthy.
Apple TV+ library is also incredibly small -- there's little excuse to go back and see what new shows are in there because there usually aren't any.
I wonder how many people are burnt out on dramas that have 8-10 episode seasons, end on a cliff hanger, and you have to wait 1-2 years for the next season. At this point, I've just stopped watching any series that isn't "done" regardless of the streaming service.
Whatever the reason may be, the article outlines a few possibilities, I do agree there is a ton of great content on Apple TV+ that people are sleeping on. I recently watched "The Morning Show", "For All Mankind", and "Presumed Innocent." All were absolutely incredible shows, and none of my friends had heard of them (people who are usually very up to date with shows) furthering that their marketing is not the best for their tv content. Ted Lasso seems to be the only show of theirs that I've felt like broke through all the noise and is most widely known.
However, I do think they have been marketing their movies a lot better. One the new movies "Wolfs" with Brad Pitt, and George Clooney had billboards all over my city. I know many people that did watch that the first week it came out.
Every time I hear about some show, what goes through my head are:
1: Do I need to buy another subscription?
2: Will I need to sit through ads?
If the answer is yes to either question, I'm not interested. I already have more TV that I want to watch than I can watch.
(I don't mind paying for shows outright, though.)
Apple TV+ generates less viewing in one month than Netflix does in one day.
(source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-21/apple-...)
> “If you’re a fan of a show on Apple TV,” says Ray, “you have this fear that it’s not being appreciated, it’s not being seen, and you have to tell people about it because the platform itself isn’t going to do it.”
I've never had this issue with Apple TV shows.
I don't know but Frog and Toad is one of my two year olds favorite shows, as is If You Give a Mouse a Cookie on Amazon. Both based on books, both really well done in my opinion.
Ted Lasso, For All Mankind, and maybe Severance aside, I'm not sure if there's much mass market awareness of Apple TV+ shows. But I'm also uncertain whether any of the streaming services aside from Netflix, Amazon Prime, (HBO) Max, Disney+, and maybe Hulu via brands like FX are able to successfully market their original content. Paramount+ maybe via Star Trek and the one-man empire that is Taylor Sheridan and his Sheridanverse (the Yellowstoneverse?), but that seems like a more limited IP stable than Disney's. There's a lot of noise, a lot of subscription fees, and a lot of losers. Apple might've produced Killers of the Flower Moon and slapped their name on Coda, but they're in a completely saturated and user-fatigued market.
This article touched on a point that I feel is very relevant: unexpected show cancellations, apparently now happening for Apple TV+, as well.
Netflix and Disney+ trained me to not even watch a show until it's concluded because it could get cancelled and I don't want to invest my small amount of free time on entertainment that might not even finish. It does produce a self-fulfilling prophecy where people with the same mindset as me on this do the same, and then the rating for something I (and probably they) are interested in aren't high enough and it gets cancelled.
What should worry them, though, is that it also led to the final step for them; I cancelled my Netflix and Disney+ subscriptions with no intention of renewing them around a year ago. The end result is that "TV series"-style shows are effectively dead to me; I've shifted my time on them mostly to novels (that are basically behind-the-curve on this trend, hopefully forever), followed by single-player video games, and finally movies. (Why didn't movies take the first slot? Because I'm only willing/able to give 30-60 minutes of continuous time to entertainment most of the time, and it's very unsatisfying to pause a movie to resume later.)
The continuous, immediate feedback on series performance coupled with a reputation of acting on that feedback immediately is killing the traditional television medium.
On top of all of that, Apple TV+ has the added albatross of requiring their hardware for the shows, as if they were somehow a siren song to get people more tightly nestled into their ecosystem, and therefore dooming their shows to failure, at least amongst people who don't want to pay for overpriced hardware running software of degrading quality over the years (I switched to Linux in 2016 because it was more reliable than my MacBook Air; being better than Windows isn't good enough anymore, especially when Linux has a greater catalog of software these days).
The needs of Apple, Inc weigh on their Apple TV division, they don't help it, and the sins of the streaming services against actually finishing a story further increase the trust deficit with Apple TV+. No amount of marketing is going to turn that around.
The walled garden certainly keeps me out of the apple ecosystem. I love MacOS but I don't want to pay a premium for vendor lock-in and I infer that most (if not all) apple products are double-edged in that manner.
They also made a massive deal with MLS that led to Messi coming to the US, and they've done a terrible job of getting an mainstream attention for that, even though it's a _great_ viewing experience -- you can watch every game, including 4 games at the same time if you want, and rewatch them whenever you want and the production quality is decent.
If nothing else, they should be doing a full court press to get newspapers and ESPN etc to increase their coverage of MLS, even the Miami Herald is barely covering soccer and Miami is full of soccer fans and the team just set the all time single season points record and has one of the greatest athletes of all time on the field.
Their content is OK outside the MLS deal.
I will get roasted for this, but I enjoyed Foundation. Decent sci-fi with some cool visuals and interesting concepts. It just had nothing to do with the actual books.
Maybe Apple should hold a yearly event building hype for their new and ongoing shows. That's by far spots Apple's best marketing channel for every other product they have
From my limited experience with Apple TV (Master of the Air and whatever that terrible Nasa one was) they seem to suffer from the same problem as most throw away TV shows on the streaming services - They lack writers who know anything about the subject matter and they couldn't care less about attention to detail.
They attempt to cash in on the emotional value of these dramatic events without doing the legwork required to do it properly and so it falls flat upon its face.
Is there yet a convenient way to watch Apple TV with Chromecast?
Well, to start, their TV shows are pretty terrible.
If anyone wants the ultimate case study in failed Apple business expansions, go back and watch the March 2019 event (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZmBoMZFC8g).
Apple TV+, Apple Card, Apple News+, and Apple Arcade where all launched there. All have been, for Apple's size and scale, business debacles. Apple TV+'s debacles are well documented in this post, Apple Card is in the news today for incompetence (and has lost billions from Goldman Sachs, and has never launched outside the US), Apple News+ is doing okay with 19 million subscribers, and Apple Arcade has caused no shortage of public publisher ire (#1).
Edit for #1:
Apple Arcade has been a dumpster fire on the backend...
https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/07/31/apple-arcade-deve...
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/10/08/ex-app-store-head...
https://mobilegamer.biz/inside-apple-arcade-axed-games-decli...
https://mobilegamer.biz/inside-apple-arcade-again-late-payme...
Apple Card doesn’t seem like a loss for Apple and customers however. Just Goldman Sachs. Though it does seem like Apple may have given GS overly optimistic data.
Apple Arcade from a user standpoint seems okay. (I have only played two games from it, but keep the subscription for other family members).
Apple TV I forget about, even though I have enjoyed some great content on it.
News, while I have it, I have never used. Same with Apple Music. (Which I think is in the same bundle of things).
Wonder what's the most dispensable Apple service. I'd guess either Apple News or Apple Fitness+. I don't think these Apple One services are chipping away hugely from Apple's bottom line, but it almost feels a little like a retread of the '90s when they were making everything from the Newton to printers to the Pippin. At least software services are cheaper to build than real gear!
I’d pay for Apple Peace and Quiet®, where they promise to stop trying to shove trials for useless Apple services down our throats.
I specifically got the Apple card because it was losing GS money and it made me laugh.
I’m also happy to take GS’s 4.x% interest
I agree that Apple isn't great about marketing it's shows, but part of the issue is that their shows just aren't that good. I imagine if you're into the Apple ecosystem, you probably get ads for them, but from the outside, it's crickets. I subscribed literally for Ted Lasso and have debated canceling every month since I finished it.
I believe Apple has some fantastic shows. Severance, Tehran, Silo, Slow Horses, Liason, Physical, For All Mankind (season 1).
I agree that Severance was good, but it came out in 2022, and the next season isn't coming out until 2025. Shrinking is another I like, but it came out in early 2023 and just started season 2 this month. I wanted to like Silo, having read the books, but something from the trailer just makes it seem off. I'll probably get around to watching it eventually assuming I don't cancel soon. The others don't appeal to me.
I think if you're ok watching the content weekly and only watch an hour or two, if feels like there is content there, but if you binge like most people who stream do, there is hardly anything there. Most people would probably be better off to subscribe for a month or two a year and cancel the rest of the time.
If you haven't already, check out Dark Matter, too!
I will. Thanks.
> "...but part of the issue is that their shows just aren't that good..."
Hard disagree from a personal view. Also statistically, I don't think you can strongly claim this since many of their shows have lots of awards if you go off that metric. I haven't done the calculations but I would guess that their content to award ratio is even higher than many other networks.
>I haven't done the calculations but I would guess that their content to award ratio is even higher than many other networks.
That is probably true, but only because they have so little content overall. It is nice that it's not choke full of low budget reality nonsense and foreign stuff, but they also have basically none of the back catalog of content that other services have.
> [...] their shows just aren't that good.
Really hard to agree with this. The shows I've enjoyed most recently are primarily on Apple. Slow Horses, Ted Lasso, Severance, Silo, Dark Matter, Foundation. And, unlike Netflix, Apple seems willing to bring back well regarded shows for a second season, instead of canceling for something new.
If you think Ted Lasso is a bad show, there is something broken in you and we can’t be friends.
There's a popular if snarky narrative that Ted Lasso started out as a straightforward comedy and then became too enraptured with character trauma-drama schmaltz. When The Bear got more focused on each character's struggles in season 2, people mocked it by likening it to Ted Lasso.
>When The Bear got more focused on each character's struggles in season 2
Honestly, that seems to be part of the playbook for almost every show now. I wonder if people just didn't notice it much until the Bear or Ted Lasso, or maybe just because it's more of an abrupt departure from the main story line in those shows instead of just being a b-plot part of a normal episode.
that's not fair, even though i know you're kidding. personally i'm tired of jason sudeikis.
The Morning Show, Severance, Silo, Tehran, Presumed Innocent, Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, Disclaimer, Shrinking, Loot, Severance, Where's Wanda?, Foundation, Cowboy Cartel (short documentary), Midnight Family, The Last Thing He Told Me, Invasion, Mythic Quest, Bad Monkey, Dickinson...
There's so many good shows on Apple TV.
So you've had about 5 years to watch 20 good shows. I've seen a bunch of these long ago. After that, what's left?
Severance is excellent, for all mankind was decent. Other ones I've watched were quitte bad indeed.
I agree that Severance was good. I suppose they'll come out with a new season right about the time I think about canceling again. I have also been watching Shrinking, but it's not really enough to keep me on the platform. Apple's content seems to be getting well known actors and then putting them into random shows and hoping that people will find out about them via word of mouth or something. There is also basically no back catalog worth watching like there is with other streaming services.
Tiny world is amazing
Apple is currently my favorite for content, so to each their own I guess.
What content? They have almost none. Granted with the segmentation in the streaming market, none of the big players have much going on, but at least you can usually find something to watch on the others. Once you catch up with the 2 or 3 interesting ones on Apple Tv, there is basically nothing to watch.
This includes movies, but browsing their "originals" list, so far I (or my wife) have enjoyed (in no particular order):
And we are looking forward to checking out, in no particular order: They're not all knockout hits. Overall we just feel safer trying something new there. If we don't like it, it's usually just because it's not for us, and less because it feels like an algorithmic, soulless cash grab.They have much less content, but if you value quality over quantity, I don't think that's an issue.
When I look at the Apple TV+ catalog, I can see myself giving an honest shake to _most_ of their content. I simply can't say the same for other services. I understand why they are flooding the zone if they have the resources, but there's a finite amount of content one human can watch.
If Apple releases 50 shows and 80% are up my alley, I get the same amount of enjoyable content as Netflix releasing 400 shows but only 10% are worth my time.
I think my issue is that it's not 80% up my alley. I see a bunch of decent looking shows that are probably good for their audience, I'm just not their audience. But even for stuff where I'm their audience, they often feel to be lacking something.
apple tv tv shows are generally bad, neutered "content"
Apple has always been kind of not great at marketing, simply because their attitude has always been "the product markets itself."
That isn't to say they don't, it's just a cultural attitude inside the company. It's a crying shame because their content teams have obviously great taste and are willing to experiment, and they must be pulling their hair out over this, but yeah – AAPL should not only do more and better marketing, but consider licensing their content out in a limited fashion to draw people in, especially if they're going to maintain 'the product markets itself' – I can still buy iPods in BEst Buy, for an example.
People WANT apple to succeed on this content front. The Apple Vision program especially would benefit from high quality content, well-marketed, especially to drive adoption and thus reduce cost; amazing immersive/interactive content is the killer app for AR/VR if you ask me.
Let silly Zuck make dumb avatars and fake lowbrow games, if I'm going to project content directly onto my eyeballs, let it be Oscar-worthy.