What Apple must do to establish its new original video streaming service

“It’s clear that Apple is building a video service. That much was obvious the moment it hired veteran entertainment executives Zack van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht. But you can’t flip a switch and create a streaming service—not even if you’re Apple,” Jason Snell writes for Macworld. “(You could buy one, but Apple has apparently chosen to build, not buy, at least for now.)”

“TV takes a long, long time to make. Apple is short-circuiting part of the usual development process by ordering its shows ‘straight to series.’ Traditionally in television (though the tradition seems to be eroding rapidly) a sample episode, called a pilot, would be produced before an entire season would be ordered,” Snell writes. “The question is, where will they go when they arrive?”

“I have a hard time believing Apple won’t charge extra for its video service, but it’s possible that it could repurpose existing Apple Music subscriptions,” Snell writes. “It seems more likely that Apple would start off with a free trial offer, as it did with Apple Music, with the hope of building its customer base that way.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Netflix presumes Apple’s original content will either be bundled with Apple Music or with iOS. It would be amazing if Apple bundled it with iOS, but we bet they want something for it. And Apple Music doesn’t make sense; wrong name.

Every Apple TV unit should certainly come with 3 or more months included. For that matter, so should every Apple device capable of playing video and audio.

What we really want to see is an “Apple Prime,” as described by Goldman Sachs analysts Simona Jankowski and Drew Borst is an October 2016 note to clients. This “Apple Prime” subscription would include the Apple Music service, access to the iTunes library of TV shows and movies (some for free), Apple’s forthcoming original content, and exclusive sports programming.

Further, we’d really like to see a way to pay for all of the Apple services we choose for one price. Give us a bunch of tick boxes and let us choose our combination of iCloud storage, Apple Music, iTunes Match, etc. and let us pay a single price for all of our choices. — MacDailyNews, October 17, 2016