Apple TV Plus: the latest on Apple’s streaming service

Apple’s streaming service hasn’t launched yet, but the company has already canceled Bastards, one of the original shows it was planning for Apple TV Plus.

It was an issue of creative differences between Apple executives and Bastards showrunners Howard Gordon and Warren Leight, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Bastards was conceived as an eight-episode series about two best friends who served together during the Vietnam War. Their lives take a depressing, monotonous turn after they return home, but everything changes 50 years later when the woman they were both in love with is killed in an accident. Their anger and resentment toward the world boils over, and they go on a shooting rampage.

Apple has released a trailer for its upcoming Apple TV Plus original series Dickinson. It’s a half-hour anachronistic comedy show starring Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit, Pitch Perfect 2 and 3) as the eponymous poet Emily Dickinson.

Per Apple’s capsule description, “Dickinson audaciously explores the constraints of society, gender, and family from the perspective of rebellious young poet Emily Dickinson.” The show was created by Alena Smith, who previously worked on The Affair and The Newsroom.

Apple is reportedly spending $6 billion on its initial lineup of TV shows, documentary series, and other originals that will land on its streaming service, Apple TV Plus. That’s about $5 billion more than what Apple was originally slated to spend, according to a Financial Times report. It’s also about 25 percent of Disney’s entire 2019 content budget.

Unlike Disney — which will allocate just under $7 billion of its estimated $24 billion content budget this year on sports properties like ESPN and another huge portion on theatrical releases — Apple is focusing its content budget entirely on streaming. So it might make more sense to compare Apple’s creative budget to Netflix’s. While Netflix is currently spending upwards of $15 billion on its own original series and films this year — more than 300 originals shot around the world — it took six years to get to that level of spending. When Netflix first started looking into developing original content back in 2012 and 2013, its budget was much smaller.

Apple’s forthcoming streaming video service is scheduled to launch in November and come priced at $9.99 a month, according to a new report this evening from Bloomberg.

The company has yet to talk pricing or a release date for the service, despite announcing it back in March of this year. But this window puts Apple’s product right up against the launch of Disney+, the entertainment juggernaut’s own streaming service that is set to feature a mix of original Disney films, Marvel content, Star Wars content, and original shows and movies across all of its properties and networks.

Apple has reportedly committed an eye-popping $5 billion dollars more to its original video content budget in a bid to better compete with Amazon, Disney, HBO, Netflix, and Hulu, according to a new report from the Financial Times.

The company had originally set aside $1 billion for former Sony Pictures Television executives Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg to court well-known creators and Hollywood stars to its platform. According to the FT, that number has jumped to $6 billion as more shows have moved through production and budgets have ballooned.

A new trailer for Apple’s first big TV show on its upcoming TV Plus streaming service, The Morning Show, pits Steve Carell, Jennifer Aniston, and Reese Witherspoon against one another as they deal with their own crises.

All three journalists are at different points in their careers: Aniston plays an aging morning anchor, Witherspoon is a reporter who is losing sight of her identity, and Carell is facing the consequences of sexual harassment allegations. Their jobs take center stage in the series, but the show will also focus on the changing landscape of morning broadcast news. The show also “explores ego, ambition and the misguided search for power,” according to a press release from Apple.

In order to compete in the upcoming streaming wars, Apple needs big names and flashy dramas for its new Apple TV Plus service. Its drama The Morning Show is shaping up to be one of those series.

A new teaser for the show, which stars Jennifer Aniston, Steve Carell, and Reese Witherspoon, makes it look like Apple’s version of The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s HBO series about a team of journalists at a CNN-like organization, as they fight trends that affect the coverage of major political and cultural events. The Morning Show’s teaser doesn’t include any of the major stars, but the dramatic voiceover about the importance of journalism today is reminiscent of the style of Sorkin’s series, which ran from 2012 to 2014.

Appearing right on time during the week of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, here’s the first trailer for Snoopy in Space, an educational Peanuts show made exclusively for the upcoming Apple TV+ streaming service. According to Deadline, Snoopy in Space “follows Snoopy as his dreams of being an astronaut become a reality when he and Woodstock tag along with the Peanuts gang on a field trip to NASA and are chosen for an elite mission into space. As Snoopy and Woodstock fulfill their dreams of astronaut training and space travel, Charlie Brown and the gang assist their friends from mission control.”

Peanuts Worldwide and NASA recently signed the Space Act Agreement, which builds on a partnership that first began during the Apollo missions in the 1960s. (NASA even went so far as to name the Apollo 10 command and lunar modules “Charlie Brown” and “Snoopy,” respectively.) The new show will be a STEM-focused series made in collaboration with NASA, designed to spark curiosity and excitement for space exploration among students.

The already-crowded streaming market is on the verge of getting some new competitors, with Apple TV Plus, Disney+, HBO Max, and more gearing up to face off against more established players like Netflix and Hulu. These companies are willing to shell out some big bucks to try to compete, with Apple reportedly spending nearly $15 million per episode on See, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

To put that number in perspective, Game of Thrones — likely the most expensive TV show made yet — took eight seasons to work its way up to a $15 million-per-episode budget. Apple is starting See out at a similar cost, which feels like a pretty big bet to place on a brand-new sci-fi series, even one with the star power of Jason Momoa and Alfre Woodard behind it. See is set in a post-apocalyptic future where all of humanity is blind. The company briefly previewed it in its sizzle reel at the Apple TV Plus announcement.

Apple’s Eddy Cue, who’s been heading up the company’s streaming efforts, has been making the rounds in the media over the last couple of days, providing glimpses into what we can expect from its TV offerings. In his latest interview with GQ Britain, Cue pushed back on reports that Apple was taking a heavy-handed approach to the TV shows that it would eventually air, saying the company hasn’t provided script notes to producers.

Last September, The Wall Street Journal published a report about Apple’s foray into TV streaming, highlighting that executives were unhappy with one early project, Vital Signs, based on the life of Dr. Dre. CEO Tim Cook reportedly said that the series was too violent and that the company wouldn’t be able to stream it. There have been other hints of division between Apple and show creators. Bryan Fuller, who was the showrunner for Amazing Stories reboot, reportedly left over creative differences. He apparently wanted a darker, Black Mirror-style show, whereas Apple wanted something a bit more family-friendly.

Apple’s head of services and programming says that the company has adopted a quality-over-quantity mindset when it comes to its forthcoming Apple TV Plus service. This weekend, The Sunday Times released an interview with Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, Eddy Cue, in which he talks about what to expect from the service forthcoming service, which is expected to launch later this fall.

The revelation is a rebuke to Netflix programming model: releasing as much original content as it can to attract viewers. In the interview, Cue says that Apple won’t be “creating the most” original content for users, but will be “creating the best.” When asked about Netflix’s model, he notes that there’s “nothing wrong with that model, but it’s not our model.”

The creators of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and developer Ubisoft have a new show coming to Apple TV Plus. Rob McElhenney took the stage at Ubisoft’s E3 press conference today to announce the news: a comedy called Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet.

Mythic Quest is set in a game studio and follows the team behind a wildly popular massively multiplayer online game. McElhenney stars as egotistical “visionary” creative director Ian Grimm.

I finally got around to watching Mid90s the other week. The film — written and directed by Jonah Hill — is a surprisingly lo-fi, intimate, personal movie about a kid trying to figure out who he is and how to fit in as he hangs out with a ragtag crew of wannabe skateboarders.

Hill does a really great job showing the isolation and awkwardness of his main character with quiet pauses and wonderfully natural, casual dialog that feels as messy as conversations among young teens really would be. It lets him build a cast of characters who feel vibrant and full, while still coming across just as lost and confused as the film’s much quieter lead.

Apple has debuted the first full-length trailer for its upcoming original series For All Mankind, which will land on the company’s upcoming streaming service this fall.

The trailer is beautiful, showcasing the kind of prestige TV Apple is trying to sell to subscribers. Developed by Battlestar Galactica showrunner Ron Moore, For All Mankind examines the space race between the United States and Russia in the 1960s and 1970s, but with a twist. According to Moore, the question at the heart of the series is, “What would have happened if the global space race had never ended?”

Will Apple’s new foray into streaming be able to swim in the same waters as Netflix and Disney, or will it go the way of Verizon’s Go90? Recode executive editor Peter Kafka and The Verge’s editor-in-chief Nilay Patel discuss Apple’s plan for streaming, news, and more.

You can listen to the discussion in its entirety on The Vergecast right now. Below is a lightly edited excerpt from this interview regarding Apple’s potential plans for streaming TV.

Last week, I forgot to write a Vergecast post for the site.

Also last week, The Verge all got together to see what part of capitalism Apple can disrupt next. As you may have guessed from reading the site in the past week, it was credit cards, television, and news.

I knew Apple had lost me when the lights came up from total darkness for what felt like the 10th time to reveal Jason Momoa and Alfre Woodard.

I knew the drill by the time they showed up: instead of actually showing something at an event called “It’s Show Time,” the actors would describe their TV show. But because the TV show was about a post-apocalyptic world where everybody has gone blind, Momoa said, “Please close your eyes. Just for a moment. Just close them. I want you to experience something. Try to think about the world this way.”

Among the most tangible announcements at Apple’s services event yesterday was also its most interesting: a credit card, aptly called the Apple Card, with both a physical and digital version that gives you up to 3 percent cash back. The product is, on the surface, a way for Apple to sell its brand on another everyday object you likely already own. But beneath the veneer of a titanium credit card with the Apple logo on it, the company is clearly charting out its post-iPhone future, one in which services reign supreme, by following a formula we’ve never quite seen it attempt before.

In this case, Apple has decided that it needs a traditional product, even one with the dubious moral baggage of a credit card, to promote Apple Pay. While the digital wallet and payment platform is growing fast, it’s still used by less than half of all global iPhone owners (and even less in the US). So just as Apple sees competing with Netflix and large cable companies as part of its future by creating its own TV shows and paying top dollar for Hollywood talent, the company no longer sees upending the status quo in payments as a viable path forward for Apple Pay.

Yesterday, at its “show time” event in Cupertino, Apple unveiled perhaps its biggest gaming venture ever: Apple Arcade. It’s a subscription service that gets users access to a large library of games for a monthly fee, playable across iOS, Mac, and Apple TV. As the App Store and other mobile markets have become dominated by free-to-play games, often at the expense of so-called “premium” titles, this presents a potential solution. “Paid games are often critically acclaimed and beloved by the people who play them, but competing with free is hard, so even the best of these games have only reached a smaller audience,” Apple said when announcing its new service.

There’s still much we don’t know about Apple Arcade, including how much it will cost and, perhaps more crucially, how Apple will be splitting revenue with developers. (I spoke to nearly a dozen mobile game developers and publishers after yesterday’s announcement, and no one was able to discuss specifics at this time.) We do know that Apple will be helping fund the development of these games in some way, and it’s been able to lure big names like Final Fantasy mastermind Hironobu Sakaguchi and SimCity creator Will Wright. Meanwhile, the teams behind App Store hits like Monument Valley, Florence, and Alto’s Adventure are all on board as well.

At Apple’s keynote on Monday, Tim Cook took the stage with a newly refined pitch for why Apple services are different. They’re intuitive, of course, and there’s the usual Cupertino fussiness around the details, but the important point came at the end. “They’re designed to keep your personal information private and secure,” he told the audience. As each new product came out — a credit card, a news service, and a premium TV channel service — the executives emphasized how careful they were being about the data involved and how much they prized the user’s privacy.

From the right angle, you can see a broader picture of how Apple thinks about services taking shape. In streaming and digital payments, Apple is competing against a generation of tech companies that are all deeply influenced by Jobs and the iPhone. A good sense of design and software ecosystems are table stakes but not enough to give them an edge against Google and Facebook. Apple’s edge is that, unlike those giants, it doesn’t sell targeted ads, and it doesn’t collect and distribute the massive amounts of personal data associated with that. Given the choice, Apple is guessing you’ll want the digital wallet without the billion-dollar ad business attached. In that way of thinking, online services compete on trust, and Apple is pitching itself as a privacy provider.

Apple announced its Apple TV Plus streaming service today, along with a handful of original TV shows that are in the works — but it left out just about every key detail beyond their names. That includes price, a release date, or a real sense of the company’s strategy, leaving open a lot of questions about how Apple plans to break into the booming streaming space.

Today’s event provided a big marketing push, to be sure: a parade of stars including Jason Momoa, Oprah, J.J. Abrams, and Big Bird graced Apple’s stage. Apple promised that the streaming service would become “the new home for the world’s most creative storytellers.”

Here are some takeaways from today’s loaded, software-focused Apple event: Apple TV Plus is a subscription service with only Apple originals. Unlike Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, you don’t get access to a back catalog of licensed shows or movies.

Apple TV Plus is not a separate, standalone app. Instead, you’ll get to it using Apple’s TV app, which is expanding to many more devices over the coming months.

Apple announced its Apple News Plus subscription at its “show time” keynote, and it’s available now for iPhone, iPad, and macOS computers. The service includes “over 300” magazines, plus access to news content from the LA Times and The Wall Street Journal, among other sources.

It’s $9.99 ($12.99 in Canada) per month to gain access to premium content, and signing up is easy. If you use Apple News, make sure that your app is updated, and that your device is running the latest software. For mobile devices including iPhones and iPads, you’ll have to download iOS 12.2 to subscribe.

After a week of nearly daily hardware updates leading up to today, Apple finally unveiled its software news with an onslaught of new subscription services. Today brings Apple subscriptions across news, television, and video games just a week after Google unveiled the Google Stadia at the Game Developers Conference.

Today’s keynote also brought a new business venture for Apple with a new credit card service. All of the above services highlight privacy as Apple’s key differentiator, with each product noting that there will no ads, and your consumption behavior will never be shared with marketers. Interestingly enough, many of the products announced today did not receive a live onstage demo, and most will be available much later this year.