Apple is reported to be close to unveiling a series of bundles for the company’s various services such as Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple News+, Apple Arcade, iCloud storage, etc.
Adam Levy for The Motley Fool:
By offering bundles of those services to consumers, Apple has the potential to improve a key metric used by most subscription services companies: customer lifetime value.
One of the simplest ways to increase customer lifetime value is improved retention and higher attach rates.
Apple has over 60 million Apple Music subscribers. But it only has about 10 million active accounts for Apple TV+ (still on free trials), and Apple Arcade’s expected to reach 12 million subscribers by year-end.
Bundled pricing should raise attach rates for the services while increasing the stickiness of those customers since they don’t want to lose their preferred pricing.
A bundle of Apple TV+ or Apple Arcade with Apple Music could expand the subscriber base for all three services. It would help Apple differentiate its music-streaming service from competitors like Spotify… [and] it would introduce Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade to more customers.
MacDailyNews Take: Plus the services also sell hardware. Apple TV+ and Apple Arcade helps move Apple TV boxes, Apple Music sells AirPods and HomePods, and Apple’s forthcoming “Apple Fitness” service will sell even more Apple Watches.
Plus, “Apple Fitness” will keep subscribers alive and paying longer. 😉
The unmatched Apple ecosystem feeds and drives itself; it’s a perpetual money machine!
TV+, Music and iCloud bundle? Yes please.
Same here — mix and match TV, Music, iCloud, and a choice of News or whatever would be great.
Lifetime value? More like a life sentence in a walled garden.
Hey, I’m all for it no matter what terms they use. I want to see Apple’s entire user base locked in to Services. Apple should offer a yearly subscription pack to really lock them in as Amazon does. Family packs, too. That monthly subscription isn’t effective enough. It’s too easy for subscribers to binge-watch in one month and then cancel their subscription the next month.
I still think Apple needs to fatten up their AppleTV+ with more content even if it’s old content. I’m sure even people of today can enjoy All In The Family,The Jeffersons, Green Acres or Married With Children. Timeless comedy.
With iWatch’s growing capabilities, Apple could even sign you up long term to monitor your post-death decay rate in the coffin which would be useful for the family and to the police but, on the negative side, they would have yet another data point to worry about. There would be an app for that.
We’ll see what offers become available in a “bundle”. In my mind Apple isn’t about customer lifetime value, sorry, but about increasing subscribers for those services (Apple News+) that aren’t doing well. Lets see how “we” can select a bundle that may be beneficial to us as individuals.. I’m not confident that will be the case.
“The unmatched Apple ecosystem feeds and drives itself; it’s a perpetual money machine!”
Unfortunately that’s not true. It actually thrives on 3rd party content from websites, streaming apps, 3rd party game/productivity/etc. Apps in their App Store and data (e.g. mapping), If Apple ever decides to exclude all 3rd party content and apps, in favor of their own apps and services, you can be sure there would be a mass exodus. At best Apple’s ecosystem rides the coattails of the 3rd parties they have been able to attract. This is partly why relinquishing exclusive control of App distribution is such big deal for Apple. IMO, if Apple were limited to only denying a 3rd party App on the grounds of privacy and security it may be much less of a problem for those clamoring for 3rd party App Stores.
No one should have control of other’s property without their consent. Both for developer’s and user’s devices, as a matter of principle. Otherwise it’s censorship over others.
I wouldn’t get arcade or news+ without a well priced bundle. I pay for cloud and music ( family) now and get tv+ for free. Not 100% happy with the TV setup so the bundle would need to be attractively priced.
The problem with these bundles is that they are not creating customer value bit are designed to boost services like arcade, news and apple +
Subscription no thanks, this is where Apple could get into trouble if they try and force third party developers sell only by subscription.