In March 2019, Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage at the Steve Jobs Theater, located on the tech giant’s sprawling spaceship-like campus in Cupertino, California, and propelled Apple firmly into the entertainment business.
It was an approprioate venue. Jobs, after all, spent much of his career at the center of technology and entertainment, helping to launch Pixar and ultimately becoming its chairman and majority shareholder before selling it to Disney.
And Cook, Jobs’ protege, was ready to bring Apple into that world too.
“Great stories can move us and inspire us. They can surprise us and challenge our assumptions,” Cook told the crowd. “We feel we can contribute something important to our culture and to society through great storytelling, so we partnered with the most thoughtful, accomplished, and award-winning group of creative visionaries who have ever come together in one place to create a new service unlike anything that’s been done before.”
What followed, of course, was not only an entirely new streaming service, Apple TV+ (now just called Apple TV), but also a new studio, with Apple producing its own films and TV shows, quickly becoming a favorite of creators thanks to its aggressive bidding for high-profile projects, and the creative freedom that the platform gave them.
But Apple is getting a new CEO in September, hardware engineer John Ternus, and his view on entertainment remains opaque, leading to anxiety in the halls of agencies that have had success selling ambitious projects to Apple over the last few years.
That inaugural Apple TV event included a barrage of directors and actors, from Steven Spielberg, JJ Abrams and Sofia Coppola to Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carell and Sara Bareilles. And it closed with an appearance from Oprah Winfrey, who announced a content deal of her own with Apple.
“Because they are in a billion pockets, y’all, a billion pockets,” Winfrey said. “The whole world has got them in their hands, and that represents a major opportunity to make a genuine impact.”
“Thank you, Oprah. Thank you. I will never forget this,” Cook said as he returned to the stage.
In 2019, Apple’s services business, which included Apple TV, cloud storage and digital advertising had revenue of $46.3 billion. Last year it topped $109 billion, a testament to Cook and services chief Eddy Cue’s desire to expand its business beyond hardware and software.
When books are written about Cook’s tenure as CEO, services will be at the center of it, and Apple TV will be at its core.
Of course, it is not a secret in Hollywood that Apple TV as a service is still smaller than many of its competitors, though Apple frustratingly remains coy on just how many users it has. But the company been making moves to grow it, cutting partnerships with Amazon and Peacock in a bid to expand.
Cue told THR last month that Apple’s first F1 race had more viewers than ESPN’s coverage of the same race a year ago, though he declined to give more specificity.
Cue, of course, isn’t going anywhere, suggesting a degree of continuity at Apple TV, but Ternus simply has not had the opportunity to weigh in on that side of the business from his perch at hardware.
The big question in Hollywood: Will he maintain the status quo, with Apple willing to spend on the projects it wants (even as its theatrical ambitions remain in flux), or will he trim fat, focusing Apple’s efforts on more lucrative services products? That may depend on how valuable Apple TV is to the overall Apple One ecosystem that Cook and Cue created.
But while he may not come from a services background, Ternus is still a mentee of Cook, and the high-margins and fast-growing services business may be too enticing to ignore.
And multiple analysts noted that there are growth levers he can pull, if he chooses to, including advertising on Apple TV, something that the company has shied away from outside of live sports.
A source familiar says that Apple has no plans to introduce an ad tier of Apple TV+ in the short term, though executives at the company have not ruled out the possibility on a longer timeframe.
“Leadership changes can enable shifts in strategy, even for large and established industry mainstays,” Madison and Wall analyst Brian Wieser wrote Tuesday. “In Apple’s case, however, the company’s approach to advertising appears tied to its product philosophy and not just its CEO. Unless that philosophy changes, ad growth is likely to be steady rather than inflecting higher.”
But Ternus could just as easily decide to double down on entertainment.
Needham Research analyst Laura Martin also suggested that advertising could be much higher if Apple chooses to go down that path, but Ternus could also use Apple’s $67 billion or so in cash to other, more ambitious use-cases.
“We believe AAPL should partner with, or buy, Disney, in order to drive longer engagement lengths and give it differentiated assets (ie, films and TV series) that have pricing power and powerful moats,” Martin writes. “We believe AAPL should also be using M&A, partnerships, and industry leadership to accelerate value creation.”
It isn’t crazy. Former Apple COO Jeff Williams is now on Disney’s board, and former Disney CEO Bob Iger not only served on Apple’s board (he left once Apple launched Apple TV+) but was a friend of Steve Jobs.
“I believe that if Steve were still alive, we would have combined our companies, or at least discussed the possibility very seriously,” Iger wrote in his 2019 autobiography The Ride of a Lifetime.
Cook has avoided that temptation, but a new CEO could bring a new point of view. The only question for Hollywood is how far he plans to lean in.
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