OTT Latecomer Apple TV+ 'Quality Over Quantity' Strategy Proven By Academy Award
The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple's "quality over quantity" strategy is paying off as the movie "CODA" won the Academy Award for Best Picture this year.
"CODA" is an original film released by Apple through its video streaming (OTT) service Apple TV+ and it contains a touching story of a deaf parent and a non-disabled daughter.
For the first time for a film released on a video streaming service, it overtook a film produced by a traditional Hollywood movie studio to win an Oscar for Best Picture.
Apple, a latecomer in the video streaming market, has a very small list of works compared to Netflix, the market leader, and Disney, the dinosaur in the entertainment industry.
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At the Emmy Awards ceremony in September last year, Apple's original drama "Ted Lasso" swept the Best Comedy Series and Leading Actor in a Comedy Series.
An industry analyst said that Apple seems to have decided to stick with quality over quantity because of the lack of inventory and (intellectual property) portfolios.
This is a strategy differentiated from Netflix, Amazon's Prime Video, Disney+ (plus), and AT&T's HBO Max, which are engaged in an arms race to produce as much content as possible.
Disney acquired 21st Century Fox following the "Avengers" franchise, Marvel Entertainment, and the "Star Wars" series Lucasfilm, to have a vast amount of content.
AT&T owns Warner Bros., and Amazon is accelerating content expansion as it recently finalized its acquisition of MGM.
Apple once had an eye on MGM, but decided to quit because the acquisition price was too high, an official told the WSJ.
Apple is also starting to expand its content portfolio on a small scale. Apple bought the rights to some works of "Peanuts" by Charles Schultz, a cartoonist famous for "Snoopy," and recently secured the right to exclusively broadcast two MLB baseball games every Friday night.
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The newspaper reported that they are weighing the exclusive broadcasting rights for some NFL matches.
Although Apple's revenue from Apple TV+ is still a small fraction of its total sales, it is estimated that it will nearly double in fiscal 2021 (October 2020-September 2021) from the previous year, reaching about $2.2 billion according to estimates.
It is also estimated that there are about 12 million paid subscribers to Apple TV+ in the U.S. for a monthly subscription fee of $4.99. Apple has never released its subscriber numbers.
