The rise of subscription streaming services shows Apple's video strategy should focus more on developing original content than building premium TV products
Pavan Rajam / the rajam report :
Context & Ripple Effects
Pavan Rajam's argument lands mid-arc in Apple's long-running video identity crisis. A few months earlier, Recode had framed the same conclusion from the negotiation side: after Apple's continuing fight with media partners, original shows were positioned as the only realistic path to TV success. By May, Bloomberg reported Apple hedging in the other direction, planning to let users buy third-party video subscriptions inside its TV app rather than individual apps.
What makes the 2018 thesis worth revisiting is how later coverage scored it. Observer's 2021 assessments of TV+ progress in a crowded market, and Spyglass's 2025 critique of a strategy built without a back-catalog and aimed at boosting device sales, both treat the content-versus-platform question Rajam raised as the fault line Apple never fully resolved.
First-order effects
- Apple faces a direct strategic fork: doubling down on original production competes head-on with Netflix's content-led model, while the premium-TV-product route keeps Apple dependent on the same media partners it has been fighting over terms with since 2017.
- Media partners gain leverage either way — if Apple pivots to originals, their carriage talks matter less; if Apple builds an aggregation hub in the TV app, they become suppliers whose subscriptions Apple resells.
Second-order effects
- An originals-first Apple pushes rivals' spending logic toward exclusive libraries rather than distribution deals, while a TV-app storefront turns Apple into a channel for services like Netflix rather than a pure competitor — two very different competitive postures the same company was weighing simultaneously.
- Without a back-catalog, as Spyglass later argued, every new Apple show must carry acquisition costs Netflix amortizes across decades of library content, raising the effective price of competing on originals alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, streaming consolidates around companies that own content libraries, leaving device-centric entrants to justify video spend as a hardware accessory — the device-sales rationale Spyglass identified in Apple's TV+ approach.
- The recurring re-examinations of this single 2018 thesis suggest tech platforms entering media face a durable accountability problem: content bets get judged years later against the scale advantages incumbents built first.
The trend: Subscription streaming keeps rewarding owned content libraries over premium distribution hardware, and each successive review of Apple TV+ measures the company against exactly the choice this 2018 analysis laid out.