How Apple TV changed streaming forever

On April 28, 2003, Apple launched the iTunes Store, kicking off its love affair with services revenue and (perhaps incidentally) saving the music industry from digital doom. Nearly a quarter of a century later, Apple Services VP Eddy Cue is set to receive the award for Entertainment Person of the Year at Cannes Lions. Does this mean Apple has saved TV and movies, too? Not quite, but the recognition is well deserved nonetheless.

Apple’s TV streaming service (named TV+ at the time) didn’t have the most auspicious of beginnings, launching a scant few months before the start of the pandemic. Streaming services with established libraries, such as Disney+ and Netflix, saw viewing figures rise significantly during lockdown, with the urge to binge so great that even niche and overseas shows like Tiger King, Money Heist, and Squid Game became unlikely breakout successes. Apple, meanwhile, was stuck with a handful of movies and shows (although Apple did have one notable lockdown hit in Ted Lasso), and was prevented by distancing laws from filming much new content. At this point, a policy of only showing original content seemed the height of lunacy.

But the advantages of Apple’s approach to streaming would become clear in time. The company recognized from the start that creating rather than syndicating makes sense financially because it scales better. Licensing fees scale with views, whereas production costs remain fixed. With original content, therefore, a certain level of engagement (views, leading to signups, leading to long-term revenue) puts you in the territory of pure profit. When you have a vast captive audience of iPhone and iPad owners to sell into, scale becomes a major concern.

In a broader sense, however, Apple understood that streaming faces a crisis of quality, not quantity. The problem is not having too little content, but having too much.

In the early gold-rush years, streaming companies wooed big-name directors with blank checks and creative freedom, happy to indulge the best of the industry to acquire prestigious titles (The Irishman, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) and fill their trophy shelves with awards. But as the market contracted and investors became more cautious, this philosophy was replaced by belt-tightening and micromanagement. It became more and more essential for content to earn back its investment, and the industry approached this by applying a method as old as Hollywood itself—take something the punters liked before and do it again, only bigger—and supercharging it with modern data analytics.

A glance at your Netflix or Amazon Prime Video home screen now is unlikely to inspire fanciful thoughts of a new golden age of TV. The stale old virtues have returned: be cautious, take no risks, do what’s worked before. Everything is built from the ground up to maximise engagement with a disengaged audience.

Sequels, prequels, and reboots are the order of the day. Cinematography is largely dead: Netflix Lighting means everything is lit neutrally to save money and avoid making any artistic decisions that can’t be reversed if focus groups get sniffy.

Dialogue, even stories themselves are simplified for second screeners. Everyone bows down to the algorithm, but the algorithm keeps serving up slop; there’s good stuff in there somewhere, but it’s impossible to find. Which means it gets no engagement. Which means no more good stuff gets made.

And all the time, of course, prices go up. And services that distinguished themselves from cable by letting you binge whole series at once, ad-free, have quietly brought back the adverts and returned to more traditional weekly schedules, which are better for keeping subscribers across multiple months.

The streaming market is a dumpster fire, in other words. And while Apple is by no means exempt from the criticisms above, the company has consistently held itself to a higher standard. It has so far resisted the urge to include painful paid ads, limiting itself to mildly annoying but skippable trailers. It beat other streamers to the Best Picture Oscar with CODA, and it continues to take risks and indulge cinematic greats. Killers of the Flower Moon, a multilingual epic about historical crimes lasting nearly three and a half hours, is scarcely targeted at people browsing Instagram on their phones.

But if there have been notable wins on the big screen, Apple TV’s most striking success has been in the realm of, well, TV.

Generally speaking, if cinema has a love-hate affair with art, TV is in a committed relationship with commerce. Shows are spun out long past their sell-by date if they make money, afflicted by filler episodes, fan service shipping, and general shark jumping–before the process begins again with a spinoff. Shows that don’t generate ROI are killed off unceremoniously. Cynics can be forgiven for enjoying the first episode of something and then immediately wondering how long it’ll be before it either ends prematurely or goes severely downhill.

But look at some of Apple TV’s offerings in this department. Severance is weird and confusing and deeply passionate, and doesn’t have an ounce of fat on it. Pluribus is beautiful and compelling, and my favorite TV show in years. Absolutely zero filler episodes there.

Tehran and Drops of God are uncompromisingly great. Who doesn’t love Gary Oldman’s disheveled cunning in Slow Horses? Nobody, that’s who. And while I’m not convinced that either Sugar or Smoke stuck the landing at the end of their first seasons, they took exactly the right kind of risks along the way.

Apple clearly hasn’t saved the TV industry, because the TV industry wasn’t dying, not commercially, anyway. But the company has held out more fiercely than any other streamer against the industry-wide decline in artistic standards. And that has to be worth an award.

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

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