Sources: Apple plans to let users buy subscriptions to some third-party video services in its TV app, rather than individual apps, starting next year
- Strategy in development looks a lot like rival Amazon.com's — Apple Inc.'s plan to reinvent cable TV is starting to look a lot like the strategy of its rival Amazon.com Inc.
Context & Ripple Effects
This May 2018 report is the hinge in Apple's video arc: after a 2016 report that Apple would cut its App Store fee to 15% for streamers who integrate with the TV app, Apple is now said to be going further — selling third-party subscriptions directly inside the TV app, a structure Bloomberg explicitly compares to Amazon's channels business. The move answers the critique in the rajam report that Apple should stop building premium TV products and instead ride the subscription-streaming wave.
The follow-on coverage shows where this leads: by early 2019 the TV service is described as a storefront where Apple hosts and serves other services' streams, alongside plans to give device owners Apple's own content free — later crystallizing as Apple TV+ at a reported $9.99/month. The subscription-aggregation play and the original-content play are two halves of one strategy.
First-order effects
- Third-party video services gain an Apple-controlled sales channel inside the TV app, trading their direct customer relationship for reach among Apple's installed base — the same trade Amazon Channels already offers.
Second-order effects
- Rival streamers face a fork: join Apple's storefront and cede billing and data, or stay app-only and compete against services that are one tap away inside the TV app; Amazon, whose model Apple is copying, sees its aggregation approach validated against Netflix-style standalone apps.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, premium TV distribution consolidates around platform intermediaries that own the customer and take a cut — with Apple's fee schedule, not the studios', setting the economics for third-party video on its devices.
The trend: Streaming video is shifting from standalone apps to platform-run subscription storefronts, with Apple following Amazon's channels playbook to become the aggregator and toll-taker on its own hardware.