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By Daniel Arkin
Apple unveiled a sweeping collection of digital services on Monday, signaling a new era for a company that has long focused on hardware and devices.
At an star-studded event Monday at its its headquarters in Cupertino, California, the tech giant announced a streaming video platform, an upgraded news and magazine app, a new iPhone-based credit card and a video game subscription platform.
The much-hyped centerpiece of the event was Apple TV+, an offering of premium original shows and movies from top Hollywood talent, including Steven Spielberg and Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston.
The company’s push into services comes amid lagging sales growth for the its marquee consumer product, the iPhone, in large part because it’s more difficult to entice iPhone owners to upgrade to newer models.
Here’s a look at the major announcements so far:
- Apple TV+ is a batch of original shows and movies that thrusts the tech company into the same streaming marketplace as Netflix and Amazon. The offerings previewed at the event included “Amazing Stories,” Spielberg’s reboot of his short-lived sci-fi anthology series of the same name, and “The Morning Show,” a look at the behind-the-scenes drama at a fictional morning news broadcast co-starring Witherspoon, Aniston and Steve Carrell.
- The Apple News+ subscription service now features more than 300 magazines, as well as The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal and access to premium digital publications, according to Roger Rosner, the company’s vice president of applications. It costs $9.99 per month.
- The new Apple Card is a payment system that will not charge users any fees. Its users will get 2 percent cash back on purchases and 3 percent cash back on Apple purchases. It is slated to debut on the Wallet app this summer, said Jennifer Bailey, the company’s vice president of internet services.
- The new Apple Arcade is a video game subscription service that will include premium paid games from a variety of developers, exclusively available to Apple users. Subscribers will pay a monthly fee, but the company did not specify a price.
The stream dream
Apple is not the only deep-pocketed player looking to gain a foothold in streaming video, a marketplace dominated by the big-spending digital titan Netflix.
Disney plans to launch a service of its own this year, bolstered by a massive library that now includes assets from 21st Century Fox, the film and TV studio it acquired in a $71 billion deal.
AT&T, the owner of HBO and the Warner Bros. film studio, is also rolling out a streaming platform in the months to come centered on popular series like “Game of Thrones.”
Netflix’s $10 billion investment in original content dwarfs that of Apple, but the latter boasts more than 1.4 billion active devices across the globe — a massive built-in audience for its new shows and movies.
Apple’s premium original content unit is led by Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg, a pair of veteran executives poached from Sony Pictures Television, the unit behind the massive hit “Breaking Bad.”
