Apple’s TV Subscription Plan is Not What You Think It Is (Premium)

With its plans for a TV subscription service in shambles, Apple may soon try to bundle its own TV, music, and news services together.

That's according to a report in The Information, anyway.

Does the plan make any sense? Sure. But it's not as closely related to Apple's original TV service plans as many believe.

Let's step through this.

The first hints of an Apple TV service emerged with the release of Steve Jobs' official biography. At the time, however, the product was viewed, literally, as an Apple-branded TV set.

"I finally cracked it," Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson prematurely, as it turns out. "[It's] an integrated television set that is completely easy to use. It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine."

Over time, however, Apple changed course and envisioned an Apple TV service that would run on the company's Apple TV set-top box, which had then moved from being a "hobby" to being an actual part of the business. Eddie Cue, an Apple senior vice president, began lining up TV networks and other content creators to sign-on, just as the firm had done a decade earlier with iTunes and music makers.

But the fan backfired when the TV industry roundly rejected Apple's service, afraid that the firm would do to TV what it had done to music, and devalue its content. So Apple reset yet again, with CEO Tim Cook stating in 2016 that the future of TV was "apps." As I noted then, that view wasn't particularly insightful: Devices like Roku and Fire TV had, for years, offered a multitude of content apps.

Since then, Apple finally released a 4K/HDR-capable version of the Apple TV set-top box. And today, the Apple TV is about as capable as a Roku or Fire TV when it comes to content apps. Given the success of Apple Music, a subscription music service, it is perhaps only natural that the company would be rethinking TV yet again. And this time, it looks like it may try to piggyback on the success of Apple Music to promote its own content.

According to two anonymous sources cited by The Information, Apple is considering creating a single subscription offering that would encompass its original TV shows, music service, and magazine articles. It would work a bit like Amazon Prime, the publication claims, though I don't see how these things are related beyond "a single place to get lots of stuff from a single company."

The first step, the publication says, is a digital news subscription service that it will launch next year. This will combine the existing Apple News app with a digital magazine subscription service, once called Texture, that Apple acquired earlier this year.

Next, Apple would bundle this subscription with the original video content it has begun producing and with Apple Music. The time frame on this, however, is unclear.

Put simply, this isn't a way to "crack" TV, it's a way for Apple to bundle a variety of unrelated p...