iVOD or VOiD strategy?
Apple is for the 3rd time offering its Apple TV+ service free of charge to its device customers.
This triggers once again the question on its awkward positioning in the SVoD market. The catalogue is clearly subcritical to justify a subscription. I personally enjoyed 2 shows (the morning one and the moon one).
But VoD is a retail business: you need to do high volumes to be successful.
So you need to show your products constantly to the consumer for him to take it. A consultant told me once “for VoD , you need island display to generate enough transaction”. Although this comment was related to T-VoD, which business model is often crippled by low gross margin and minimum guaranteed requested by the studios, I think that it applies to SVOD too with a slightly different logic: S-VoD success comes also from the number of subscribers. And in an highly competitive environment, lots of end-users are regularly arbitrating among the different subscriptions. and if you don’t remember the last time you opened the app, you will probably cancel your subscription.
Added to this, there is something that irritates me whenever I go on Apple TV App: the app proposes lots of titles but you need to go through the all browsing to know if you are entitled to watch it. let’s list the cases:
- movies that you have downloaded on your device through iTunes (yes, we used to do this) or that you have purchased,
- movies that Apple is selling or renting through iTunes,
- titles from tier services that you are subscribing, and which app is installed (that is a nice intention to aggregate the diff offers),
- titles from tier services with whom Apple has made an agreement and is promoting (even if you have not downloaded the app), this leads to a lengthy process: download the app/ subscribe open the app and watch;
- titles from Apple TV+…
Apple TV app value proposition is confusing
According to me, the value proposition of the app is too confusing for the end user to use it on a regular basis. (and I am not talking about name issue : Apple TV app that is different from the Apple TV+ service)
Honestly, beside Apple groupies from the Silicon Valley that have dozen of iDevices and have spent a fortune on this ecosystem (incl., purchasing all their movies in EST and all their music from app, before accepting to access to the same music on a monthly basis) who is launching this app on a daily basis???
So, the only remaining explanation is to support the device sales (that the purpose of waving the service with a device purchase). But do we really think that end user purchasing decision for a 1000$ smartphone will depend on a 1 year free subscription to AppleTV+?
Refocusing the Apple TV on the super-aggregator value positioning?
Apple benefits from a unique position with its store: it his able to impose some strong rules to app developers and Apple is very good in doing nice devices, easy to use.
So why don’t they crack the super aggregation of VoD content and offer a single entry door to the different subscriptions of the end users? and stick to this?
It would be differentiative and would represent less investment.
And you, what do you think of this strategy?
