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Thursday, March 20th
“When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.”
-Steve Jobs
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Markets Today
🌏 Asia-Pacific: Mixed
🇪🇺 Europe: Down
🇺🇸 United States: Down
🛢️ Oil: Down
⚡Crypto: Up
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Major Market Events
- Trump responds to Fed meeting, saying rate cuts will help economy
- US joblessness ticks up, but labor market stays fairly steady
- Ten year treasury slips below 4.2%, making loans cheaper
🤔 My Thoughts
A publication called The Information just dropped a bombshell report about Apple’s Apple TV streaming service.
They reported that Apple is losing over a billion dollars a year…
As they spend over $5 billion a year in the crowded streaming content market.
Despite the popularity of shows like Ted Lasso and Severance, they are struggling to compete with behemoths like Netflix and Hulu.
(And frankly despite being beautifully filmed, we found Severance to be boring. One wag quipped that it’s like watching The Office, but without the jokes)
They’ve tried everything from high concept Sci-Fi with Shrinking and The Foundation, to what should be a lay-up winner, a WW2 naval action film starring Tom Hanks.
But it’s just not breaking through in this crowded market, lagging behind even Amazon, which has had its own streaming struggles, like with the massively expensive Rings of Power show, that struggles to hold viewers.
Unsurprisingly, the user experience for Apple TV looks and feels great. It’s easy to use on a TV or a tablet. But the content just isn’t there. They clearly wanted to go for prestige HBO style television, and this highlights how difficult that is to pull off.
And this is a broader problem for Apple. It’s one of the most successful companies of all time, but since we lost Steve Jobs, they’ve struggled to innovate and show clear leadership.
Steve Jobs wouldn’t have been interested in making a Netflix clone.
It’s hard to say what he would have done instead, but maybe this decline is part of the natural lifecycle of companies that have seen such a meteoric rise.
Of course even with recent volatility, and streaming failures, Apple has a staggering $3.2 trillion market cap. I’m writing this to you now from a MacBook, and it will be published from an iPhone.
So Apple isn’t going anywhere. But it may be settling into a role like IBM or Microsoft, instead of being the titan of innovation it once was.
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Testimonial of the day:
Qamar Z. about the Wave Indicator:
