CEO Tim Cook and a roster of big-name celebrities, including Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey, announced the company's much-anticipated entrance into the crowded video-streaming market at a press event Monday afternoon inside the underground Steve Jobs theater at its Cupertino, California, headquarters. The company is producing its own lineup of films and TV shows that will be available via an updated version of the company's TV app on Apple devices. It is working with a number of existing streaming services, such as HBO, Starz, and Showtime, to flesh out what's available there, in addition to its own streaming subscription. The company also announced its own mostly-digital credit card and a subscription magazine option for its news app.
Apple is launching a paid, ad-free video portal for its own original movies and TV shows called Apple TV+. The product will launch this fall, but Apple has not yet revealed a price for it or said exactly how many shows it will have at launch. It will probably live as its own channel within the existing Apple TV app. The original programming and streaming subscription are just one part of Apple's larger plan to get into streaming video. It pairs with Apple TV Channels, a storefront for other companies' subscription video-streaming offerings. Apple's new shows include two docu-series from Oprah, a show called "See" about a world where everyone is blind after an apocalypse starring Jason Momoa and Alfre Woodard, and "The Morning Show" with Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston and Steve Carell (Full disclosure: CNN's Brian Stelter is a consultant on "The Morning Show"). Other big names working on projects include Steven Spielberg, Kumail Nanjiani, J.J. Abrams, M. Night Shyamalan, and Damien Chazelle.
Apple is creating a single place where all the content from your various subscription services can live side-by-side. The company is updating its existing TV app and adding the ability to sign into your to various cable and streaming subscription services. The Apple TV app has been redesigned to look similar to other popular streaming services like Netflix with vertical carousels of content and recommended things to watch next. There are tabs on the top for Watch Now, Movies, TV shows, Sports, Family and Library. Shows from each service you subscribe to -- including Hulu and Prime Video, but notably not Netflix - will appear as if they're all part of the same service, side by side. The new version will roll out as a software update in May and as a new app on Macs in the fall.
Apple also announced it was overhauling its news app, which Cook said is the number one news app in the world. He did not clarify if that number relates to readers or downloads. Now called Apple News+, the app is adding more than 300 magazine subscriptions for a monthly subscription price of $9.99. Cook touted the news app's human editors and tightly-controlled selection of news outlets as something that sets it apart from other online news sources - a pointed comment during a time when other tech companies have been criticized for helping spread misinformation. Apple also said the app would not allow advertisers to track readers.
Apple is partnering with Goldman Sachs to make its own credit card due out this summer - no plastic required. Apple Card will be available on all iOS devices in the Wallet app. It has a rewards system that adds 2% of any Apple Pay purchase amount directly back to the Apple wallet as cash. The deposits are made daily, and the reward goes up to 3% for purchases of Apple products and down to 1% for purchases made with the physical card. Every purchase needs a fingerprint or face-identification confirmation. For privacy reasons, Apple said it doesn't track where payments are made or for how much. The budgeting features are done on the device, and Apple said it will not sell user information to third-parties.
Apple will offer a new ad-free subscription gaming service called Apple Arcade, which lets users access more than 100 games exclusive or new to Apple. The service will be available this fall in 150 countries. The company did not announce any pricing. The games will need to be downloaded, but users will be able to stop a game on one device and pick it up at the same spot on another.
