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It's official. Sure On March 25, Apple will hold a long-awaited event in which it will detail its upcoming streaming and media subscription services. This will undoubtedly be the most important announcement of the company this year.
During the presentation, Apple executives must inform whites very important in their ambitions for underwriting. The company has already made agreements with artists such as Oprah Winfrey, Mr. Night Shyamalan and Reese Witherspoon. His shows have already attracted such talents as Chris Evans, Jennifer Garner and Steve Carrell. And it has committed at least $ 1 billion to the project, a pittance given the company's war chest, but enough to show the seriousness of its intentions. But beyond that? Nobody outside Cupertino has any idea what the company has planned.
Apple
"We have no information. We do not know the price or the business model, "says Day Rayburn, Continuous Media Analyst at Frost & Sullivan. "Now we will finally understand what the hell is Apple doing."
The possibilities are wide. What shows and films will be available at launch and how often will new entries arrive at the library? Will it act from its own product or from a broader subscription encompassing Apple Music and Apple News? What demographic group will he target? Will Apple make this free for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV users? Will he use his content subscription to direct you to other Apple services, like Apple Pay?
The closest CEO, Tim Cook, came to clarify these details, was included in the company's last call for results – and it was not very close at all. "We will participate in the world of original content," Cook said. "We have signed a multi-year partnership with Oprah. But today, I am not ready to prolong this conversation beyond this point. We have hired great people who I trust. They work very hard and we will have something to add on this later. "
This "later" now has a date. (Which, it should be noted, was reported by BuzzFeed News for the first time in February.) But regardless of the details given by Apple on March 25th, it does not matter to calm your curiosity. It will also have a significant impact on the future of Apple, which is increasingly relying on its service business to offset the decline in revenue from its iPhone.
Not that the iPhone suddenly became unpopular. It still accounts for nearly two-thirds of Apple's revenue. But smartphones have long been in the mainstream. People improve them less often, because each year brings iterations and improvements rather than real advances. We do not even know what an iPhone advance would look like, at least until Apple is ready to experiment with a folding phone, which seems unlikely at least for the next two years. Not surprisingly, in the last quarter, iPhone sales were down 19 percent from a year ago.
Other ranges of Apple hardware do not offer much respite. The most exciting advancement in computers, tablets and watches that you can expect this year? A long awaited update for the iPad mini. Recently, Apple has also moved back on the flashy updates of the operating system, focusing on stability and security. None of this is a blow to Apple products or Apple's business. It makes truly state-of-the-art devices and sells them more money than anyone else.
But for growth to continue and to help offset the inevitable slowdown in the iPhone, Apple needs to expand its services. This is not a controversial position; The company has publicly declared its goal of doubling this activity from 2016 to 2020. You have also seen some signs of this initiative, whether to put Apple Music on Echo devices or iTunes on Samsung and other TVs premium. "We have some interesting projects underway on services, of course we're doing it on the products as well," Cook told CNBC in January. "It's another way to grow the business."
Subscriptions will be the cornerstone of these ambitions. In fact, via Apple Music, they already are. But adding streaming content and traditional media partners could push its service business much further than it has ever been. Apple said its service revenues were correlated with its installed base, which had grown by more than 100 million devices in the last year alone. Subscriptions also have the advantage of not being subject to seasonality or the ups and downs of the sales cycle of a given product. It is extremely unlikely that the service sector of Apple is getting closer to the sales of its iPhone. But this is clearly the biggest untapped opportunity in society.
All this presupposes, of course, that Apple ends up with programs that people will pay. "The installed base is useful, but you also need the content and business model that consumers want," says Rayburn. He cites the example of YouTube TV, which has gained relatively little success despite the support of a massive platform. "Content is king. Has always been.
So yes, Apple will have WWDC this summer and an iPhone event in the fall, as always. You can expect that they go a lot as they always do. But March 25 will be much more important for Apple's future, precisely because it will have the only thing that has not been done in recent years: something totally new.
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