Apple TV+ reportedly loses $1 billion a year, and that’s okay—for now

The Information report claims notable losses for Apple's only service in the red.

See full article...

 

[balthazarr]

Quality over quantity will pay off over time. A billion sounds like a huge amount, but it's a drop in the Apple ocean.

I see it more as a halo product - great marketing (especially when winning awards) and generating buzz about Apple and its products.

Steady as she goes, Tim. Don't listen to the perpetual-next-quarter shareholders on this one.

 

[balthazarr]

Fwiw, if you pull apart the HLS manifest that Apple TV produces for any of its shows, you'll find ad stubs injected by the manifest server (independent of the preroll promotions). This isn't unusual in and of itself, but it does indicate that ad decisioning is something they've designed for in their play stack even now. (for those unfamiliar with streaming, an ad decision point is basically a stub in the playlist where the player will call back to the server and accept playlist fragment insertions, generally representing ads)

From a technical standpoint, the only really interesting thing about this is the fact that it isn't using Apple's own HLS interstitial support (which is the Blessed™ way of doing server-guided ad insertion on HLS), but rather their own weird custom thing afaict. But from a business standpoint this is interesting because it kind of tips their hand: ads are coming eventually, even if Apple hasn't said anything about it.

Not disagreeing with you, but it's not necessarily a fait accompli. It makes sense to plan ahead and design the infrastructure to support it.

They also serve out their subs to other services - like Prime, for example. I don't know how that works technically, but Prime may want to insert ads for their subscribers so makes sense to have a mechanism through which to do that.

Having said all of that. The instant they insert ads, I'm out. As it is, the pre-rolls are barely tolerable.