By
Godfrey Benjamin
March 22nd, 2024
Apple TV Plus launched on Friday for $4.99 per month with only four original shows and no library of licensed content.
Long-awaited Apple’s TV streaming service Apple TV Plus is finally live and you can start watching it on any platform that offers the Apple TV app, including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and support non-Apple devices, as well as on the web at tv.apple.com.
Apple is launching with a library of nine titles, and a few more announcements are to come during the next few weeks. Also, the venture counts Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg among its first wave of talent. Apple TV Plus launched on Friday with just a handful of original programs. Apple TV+ costs $4.99 per month, even though for many users it will be possible to catch a grip on the company’s promotional deal to get one year for free.
Officially, it costs $4.99 with a 7-day free trial but if you buy a new Apple device (iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV or iPod touch) you become eligible for a free year trial.
However, not everybody seems to share the company’s groundless excitement. The thing is in the SVoD (subscription video on demand) overflow, the question is – why would someone pay Apple for few shows produced by a company that has no experience creating content?
But let’s go from the start (it won’t take long, it’s only four shows). The first, and by experts, the best is “Dickinson” which is about the life of the poet Emily Dickinson. The second one is “For All Mankind” which portrays an alternate universe where America loses the space race. Created by Ronald D. Moore of “Battlestar Galactica” and “Outlander”, this could be a hit especially regarding the current political situation in the US.
The third one is “See” and it depicts a world where people cannot see so they are forced to gather into hunter-gatherer tribes. Even though producers even hired blind and low-vision cast and crew, it didn’t go good in the eyes of the critics (who can still see, respectively).
The last (and hopefully the least) is “The Morning Show”. Even though it has a great A-list cast (Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, Steve Carrell) it seems the plot is on the border of becoming anti-MeToo.
However, if go back to the stats, with around two billion devices users hold around the world, it would need only 10 percent of those users to sign up and the company would immediately have 200 million subscribers worldwide. Just for comparison, Netflix currently has 139 million subscribers.
With their beginner’s package to anyone who buys a device, 10 percent doesn’t seem so hard to manage. Still, we’ll have to wait and see what will happen when Disney+ launches in less than two weeks on Nov. 12. There are also NBC’s Peacock, which should be launched in spring next year, and WarnerMedia’s HBO Max that is slated for May 2020.
Over 1 Million Subscribers for Disney+ Prelaunch
Even though Disney’s new streaming service, Disney+, is not going to be launched until mid-November, the latest data show that it already has more than a million subscribers in the United States according to the analytics firm Jumpshot.
Earlier this month, analysts at UBS said that among 1,000 consumers, 86% of them heard of Disney+ and 44% said they were “likely” to subscribe. This percentage puts Disney ahead its own projections, In April this year, the company predicted 20 million to 30 million U.S. subscribers by 2024 and 60 to 90 million worldwide subscribers by that time.