Apple’s Still-Secretive TV Plans: Here’s What We Know So Far, Including a List of Shows – AppleTV 4 Jailbreak (appletv4jailbreak.com)
It’s one of the biggest mysteries in Hollywood: Where will viewers watch Apple shows, and how will they be marketed? All may be revealed later this year.
It’s the biggest question in Hollywood that everyone is asking, and no one has an answer yet: What will Apple’s upcoming video offering actually look like, and how will it be delivered to viewers?
“I don’t know, and nobody knows, and it makes me nervous,” said one top Hollywood agent. “I’d sell one-off deals with Apple all day long. But I’d never do a [major, long-term talent deal] with them because I don’t know what it means to be an Apple show. How do they market it? Where’s it going to show up? How are people going to see it? It makes no sense to me.”
All is expected to be revealed later this fall, as Apple gears up to enter an already saturated marketplace in early 2019. The competition is fierce: Netflix has 125 million customers globally, while Amazon just revealed that Prime has 100 million consumers (although most of those users are presumably in it for the free shipping, not TV shows). Hulu is also in the mix, albeit at a much smaller level, and Disney is prepping its own big entry.
But Apple has a major leg up: Its hardware is already pervasive around the globe. The company has more than 1.3 billion devices currently in use worldwide — instant wide penetration for whatever new TV app might pop up on everyone’s screens when the time is right.
Apple has been quiet about its TV ambitions so far, beyond occasionally confirming another big-budget project with A-list stars and producers attached. That’s a bit out of character for TV bosses Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, who were much more accessible as the presidents of Sony Pictures Television, where they were required to make extra noise as an independent studio without a network attached.
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Van Amburg and Erlicht report to Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, who admitted during a SXSW interview last month that “we don’t know anything about making television.” But he did outline that the team of about 40 staffers now charged with populating Apple’s video content would be focused on quality over quantity — with “a few surprises… we think there are ways to leverage technology to make the viewing experience even…
https://www.indiewire.com/2018/04/apple-tv-series-2019-reese-witherspoon-1201955304/
