“One of the things that you have to realise for yourself is we don’t know anything about making television, so what skillsets does Apple bring to that? The viewpoint is very little.”
Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, sat down with CNN’s Senior Media Reporter Dylan Byers today at SXSW to discuss Apple’s TV and News strategy.
The largely evasive talk, titled ‘Curation in Media – Why It Matters’, took the Austin Convention Centre audience through Apple TV and News strategy.
While Eddy Cue skirted around topics like future acquisitions, Apple’s investment in AI and AR, and even the iPhone’s affect on our spines, he did admit to Apple’s less advanced position when it comes to making TV shows.
“We like doing what we think we know how to do and what we can be great at,” he said. Cue should know, the exec is in his 30th year with Apple and helped create the iTunes and App Stores.
Apple won’t buy Netflix
While Cue said Apple won’t be purchasing Netflix (it could if it wanted: Apple is worth over $910bn and Netflix is $25bn in debt), the tech giant recently hired two executives for its grand TV strategy and now has a team of 40 people both based in the US and overseas.
“We’re completely all in. There’s a difference though; we’re not after quantity, we’re after quality,” Cue said. “We don’t try to sell the most smartphones in the world; we don’t try to sell the most apps, we try to make the best one.”
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In November last year Apple secured the new drama starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon based on Brian Stelter’s Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV.
They had better be thinking bigger if they’d like to complete with market giants Amazon, Netflix and Stan however. Every other company in the space has a large rent project: e.g. Netflix has The Witcher, and Amazon has acquired the TV rights to Lord of the Rings.
Eddy Cue discussed Apple’s purchase of digital magazine service Texture
Eddy @cue of @Apple on acquisition of Texture. #sxsw pic.twitter.com/GkSs1NCQU4
— KVUE News (@KVUE) March 12, 2018