Unauthoritative Pronouncements

First reported by Juli Clover at MacRumors based on Reddit posts, and confirmed by Jay Peters at The Verge, Disney+ and Hulu have gone the way of Netflix and you won’t be able to subscribe to the services through Apple any longer. This is way bigger news than when people freaked out about Apple TV+ being a Channel on Amazon Prime Video. Apple is giving Amazon some kind of cut of their subscription revenue of Apple TV+ subscribers, but whatever that is, it’s a percentage of $10. Amazon offers a lot in exchange for that in terms of marketing and featured placement of Apple TV+ shows, and the service itself, inside of Amazon’s interface.

Contrast that with what Apple provides to Disney and it’s a lot less bang for the buck. Apple largely promotes its own Apple TV+ service in Apple’s interfaces meaning Apple provides almost no marketing advantage. (Let’s not forget that Disney is a marketing juggernaut, so tossing them a tile buried 10 rows down in the interface is meaningless.)

More importantly, Disney is increasingly concerned with flexible tiers and bundles so that they can charge more. Especially when Disney launches their ESPN service later, which is almost guaranteed to be incredibly expensive. Disney will try to offset that with bundles. I’m sure Disney might even want to toy around with locking people into yearly subscriptions paid on a monthly basis, à la cable TV.

Despite Apple being Disney’s BFF, Disney needs to have infrastructure to handle all these bundles and tiers, which will be very expensive, so why involve Apple acting as a glorified payment processor?

People are very willing to give their money to Disney, with or without Apple as a middle-man. Just like they are with Netflix.

It seems to me that this high profile departure is just the start of streaming services reconsidering how essential Apple’s subscription infrastructure is to them. What exactly do they get from Apple, and how do they limit themselves?

Certainly, as customers, it’s nice to subscribe through Apple’s in-app-purchase system and manage the subscriptions where you can just cancel without being shoved into a customer retention pipeline. However, it’s not so nice that people are going to eschew services that don’t use that system. We already don’t skip those services.

Apple is too comfortable with just sitting around while money comes in, and they really need to figure out how they can be a valuable partner instead of an overpriced payment processor.