Apple TV Plus is getting a price hike – and other Apple subscriptions are, too | Hacker News Reader

Apple TV Plus is getting a price hike – and other Apple subscriptions are, too

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48 pointsTiredOfLife65 comments

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Apple TV+:

- Nov 2019 introduction: $4.99

- Oct 2022 hike: $6.99

- Now: $9.99

That's not just inflation. That's a helluva rise, to double in just four years.

It makes me wonder whether it's more due to being priced below cost initially, or whether it's more about costs having doubled with Apple TV+ putting out so much new content now.

I mean, Apple TV+ has definitely been growing much larger and faster than I ever would have expected, in terms of content.

I suspect this is for a few reasons, and somewhat agree with your conjectures.

One of the reasons being the platform's popularity and quality of work, which has allowed them to attract higher quality talent (which in turn costs more). Another reason is anticipation of an increase in royalties/residuals as a result of the end of the writer's strike and the eventual conclusion of the SAG-AFTRA strike.

And finally because the Apple TV platform now has considerable more content than it did at launch, and can command a higher price.

I felt their library catalog is lackluster compared to other streaming services. The contents I want to watch are usually buy, rent or with supplemental subscription. They have a reasonable tv shows selections but most of them seems to be Apple Original. Their movie catalog is very lacking, not sure if it is a specific genre (Horror) seems non-existent or require to buy, rent or other subs instead of including with Apple TV+.

The beauty of their streaming service is that it's incredibly simple to pause your subscription. We do it all the time. When something shows up that we want to watch, we subscribe with one click. When we finish it, we unsubscribe with one click.

I agree with you. My comment is an response to their price hike. Usually when it comes to price hike, there are justification for it. My point is that Apple don't have a justification to increase their subscription pricing because they don't includes many things in the catalog without paying extra. The sub includes Apple Originals which is not wrong with that, it feels they should include more than their original contents to get a better deal out of their subscription.

That is exactly what Apple TV+ is – Apple Originals, basically exclusively, and why it has historically been priced cheaper than other streaming services. They have explicitly not been trying to build up a catalog of non-owned movies and shows. The movies and shows you say are available to buy and rent are not in fact a part of the Apple TV+ service, but are browsable in to the Apple TV app.

I wonder how many people actually pay for Apple TV by itself.

We get a family Apple One plan (https://www.apple.com/apple-one/); $25/month gets all of us extra iCloud storage (which we'd need anyways), Music (which we want anyways, and would be $17/month for a family plan). The TV side of things is essentially free.

That is exactly the point, as I have been saying since 2019. Or probably before even Apple TV was introduce.

iCloud Storage and Apple Music has a fixed cost per unit model. i.e It cost Apple X for every GB you stored, and X for every song you listened to. Low margin business that requires volume.

Apple TV is capital intensive and has a paid once for making content and it is basically free for as long as Apple owns it.

By Bundling together they get you to subscribe more than one service ( Storage and Music ), and Apple TV acts as bundled extra that makes you feel getting very decent value.

That is Apple essentially spending money ( Mostly services money from Google's default search engine ) on digital / media asset to be bundled into their subscription model to hopefully create a moat.

It makes a lot of sense from a Business and Financial perspective. But I still dislike Apple going to media business.

If you like the stuff on it, it's actually pretty cheap compared to what media used to cost.

I would rather see prices go up than see For All Mankind get cancelled. :)

Apple is putting out new content but they have essentially no external content library and the quality of Apple TV+ shows is a hit and miss.

No it's greed.

Exactly... It's a big fat bait and switch. Don't tell me they didn't know what all the costs of this was going to be. They get deals by committing to prices for a number of years. They know the costs of IP, production, cloud streaming, etc. They didn't build this whole thing going into it blind.

The only other thing that I think it could be... they don't have as many subscribers as they planned. People fucking sick of 69,420 streaming services with no content. People sick of getting milked by subscriptions.

> Don't tell me they didn't know what all the costs of this was going to be.

They... didn't. You think, back in 2017 when they were planning the service, they knew how much programming they'd producing six years in the future and at what price point?

Corporations aren't nearly as smart as you think they are. Budgets are changed on a year-by-year basis according to how consumer behavior is different from what they predicted, and how the competition and overall market is different as well from what they predicted.

> They get deals by committing to prices for a number of years.

No idea what you're talking about. What deals? Committing to what prices? Apple TV+ isn't purchasing existing shows. They're making Apple TV originals. The budget for each season of a TV show is set shortly after that show gets ordered/renewed for a first/subsequent season, and it changes based on how successful the show is.

They're not "going into it blind", but predictions for anything -- viewership, costs, competitor prices -- are very often off by a factor of 2 within a year or two in the corporate world. Apple isn't made of oracles, just regular business analysts.

I felt from the start that a $4.99 price point right out of the gate from Apple was going to get increased sooner rather than later. Honestly, I'm surprised it has taken them this long and will probably be going even higher.

Doesn't feel that different than how YouTubeTV prices have steadily risen since it's introduction. It's now $72.99/month. In 2017 it was $35/month.

I don’t understand why cloud storage prices are going up as costs should be deflationary as disks and bandwidth get cheaper.

IP costs more, but that sucks.

I liked the apple one bundle at $20, but at $26 it’s pretty stupid.

It's probably due to the other things in the bundle. icloud+ (so just the storage) seems to have kept the same prices since 2018, and the 50GB and 200GB tier haven't changed price since 2016. Both the change in 2016 and 2018 were price drops.

I don't know why the price never dropped after 2018, but at least the highest icloud+ tier it's in line with what other providers charge for cloud storage. It just doesn't get that much cheaper than $5/TB.

No, consumer cloud subscriptions don't tend to decrease in price. Instead, they add capacity over time at the same price point.

E.g. in 2017 Apple changed its $9.99/mo plan from 1 TB to 2 TB.

And by the way it's still at that $9.99 price. It hasn't gone up, at least not in the US. Compared with inflation, it actually has gotten cheaper in real terms.

Cloud storage costs aren't going up, the 2TB plan has been $9.99 its entire lifetime.

That's funny because I just canceled my subscription over their treatment of Jon Stewart.

and honestly there's been little coverage of it...which is terrifying. I get why Apple did what they did, but it's kinda disturbing. But then again, Tim Cook is practically a member of the CCP, and got his marching orders when the CCP learned that Stewart was going to make an episode that was critical of them.

Stewart should go the independent route - he'd instantly be the top content creator in the news/opinion space.

How do you define "little coverage"? I read about it on HN and the NY Times.

Yeah, I saw it in a bunch of places. It didn't take off as a major controversy in the public consciousness, but that doesn't seem to be because it was hidden away.

I'm probably out. I have the $32/mo Apple Family sub, but with literally every service going up 20-30% over the last year, I just don't see the point. I used to spend about $60-80/mo on various streaming services, now it's closer to $150 and content quality has not improved, if anything it's significantly worsened.

They've successfully kneecapped Netflix, so now they get to restore the cable TV status quo.

At this point I'd say it's more the situation that the industry has consolidated into few enough companies (WB/HBO/Discovery, Disney, Paramount, Comcast(NBC/Universal), Netflix, and Apple) that they're able to easily price fix.

The problem is that just 6 companies own the rights to basically the entirety of American film culture outside of some tiny niches.

This is worse than going back to cable. We're almost all the way back to the Old Hollywood studio system, where different studios had different theaters they owned and almost nobody else was allowed to show their studio's films.

First cable tv prices sky rocketed with a lot of ads and cord cutting became a thing. Now streaming services are raising pricing and subscription fatigue has started the cord 2.0 cutting.

I've gone from about 12 subscriptions (Netflix, Crave, Disney+, Apple Tv+, Fubo, Dazn, PrimeVideo, TSN, SportsNet, Funimation, CrunchyRoll, YouTube Premium) down to 6 and thinking of cutting another 3 and only keeping Netflix for kids, Prime (well because of Amazon Prime) and YouTube for me.

Not so fast... Amazon announces Prime Video is Adding Commercials For All Subscribers (iv 2024)

https://cordcuttersnews.com/amazons-prime-video-is-adding-co...

At least so far most streaming subscriptions are easy to cancel, so you can rotate through the different services depending on what you want to watch. Only a matter of time until services try to prevent that by locking you into yearly or longer contracts.

I subscribed just to watch "Invasion" but I realized too late it's a bad show. Not paying another month. Not been impressed with Apple TV at all. Foundation is alright, but probably just because it's based on books by Isaac Asimov.

Ted Lasso, For All Mankind, Hijack, The Morning Show, Mythic Quest, The Problem with Jon Stewart, Shrinking, Silo. All good shows worth checking out!

Definitely agree with that list! The new Lessons in Chemistry is also really solid! Severance was also noteworthy although a bit slow going. Shrinking was really good. Physical, and the one about Bezo’s ex-wife becoming her own person and running her foundation was pretty funny… overall I think Apple is doing their best to target a certain demographic and I for one appreciate it. They have spent more on writing than other services, it would seem.

I also really enjoyed Slow Horses.

>For All Mankind

I’m halfway through the first season, and it’s got a lot more Ted Lasso-type scenes of people talking about their feelings than I was expecting. Does it refocus more on the actual premise of the show later, or is it like this all the way through?

It's both a high quality drama about the characters' lives and a detailed, well researched alternate history story with interesting differences in politics and technology as it goes on.

Let's just say it doesn't shy away from torturing its characters, whereas Ted Lasso is a lot more even-handed in that regard, with equal measures of torture and wholesome moments. For All Mankind definitely leans harder towards "outer space makes life difficult and dangerous" in its balance between joy and pain.

If you're thinking that the original premise was basically an alternative history space program procedural, it'll become less focused on that over time. The space flight parts will become less and less plausible, and the plot will mainly be driven by totally artificial drama and disasters caused by these characters with huge and obvious flaws being given increasing amounts of responsibility.

I think it's still worth watching to a point, but the quality is monotonically decreasing. Once you're annoyed more often than enjoying the show, stop watching. It won't recover. (For me, season 3 was honestly purely a hate-watch of wanting to see just how far down the show would sink.)

Thanks for the heads up. I was pretty checked out by episode 2 (Everyone knew Wernher was a Nazi. Hell, by 1970 they had been rearming Nazis in West Germany to fight the Soviets for 20 years!) but as you say it was only getting worse. I just read through the episode summaries and it doesn't sound like I missed much.

What the hell even happened? It's not like Ronald Moore lacked experience. After Voyager and BSG he should know the formula: the A plot is actual story events and B plot is interpersonal conflict among the cast. You set up conflicts in the B plot to add tension on if they can overcome the challenge in the A plot. What you don't do is spend 40 minutes out of a 60 minute episode on squabbles among the astronaut wives. It's a show about stuff happening in space! Show us things happening in spaceships!

Just another failure to add to the scrap pile of all the "prestige" dramas produced during Peak TV. Hollywood responded to an unprecedented demand for content during Covid by disappearing up their navels about gender and race. An incredible waste of billions of dollars and millions of man-hours.

Severance is excellent. As is For All Mankind.

As someone who's into more light-hearted fare...

The After Party is fun. It's a murder-mystery, with each episode retelling the same night of the murder in the style of a different film genre. Rashomon-y, but more about playing with genre than with strictly what was seen.

Mythic Quest is pretty well targeted for the HN crowd, insofar as it's a comedy set in a video game studio, and does a lot about software-dev culture.

The Big Door Prize is also excellent and light hearted but asks big questions

Severance, extremely slow burning but turns into a great show.

Severance had stronger Philip K Dick vibes than other shows that were actually based on his work.

As were Ted Lasso, See, and Servant (all done now).

I found Severance to be pretty meandering and I didn't like the acting. I'll give it another try.

The lore building in it is really enjoyable to me.

It almost reminds of me Tales from the Loop, which is extremely slow but all about world building.

It's a slow burn but a solid mystery/drama. The end of the season has some edge-of-your-seat moments that wouldn't hit nearly as hard without all of the smaller moments from the middle of the season

I almost stopped watching because the middle episodes (of the first season) were just wheel spinning. But the last 3 episodes surprised me, they really redeemed the season in a big way.

A victim of the medium. Prestige TV almost always has too little writing to cover too many episodes. At least with episodic TV you could skip the filler episodes, but when long-form linear TV drips out plot revelations every ten minutes you have to sit through the whole thing.

Also Bad Sisters

Don’t forget Drops of God

Foundation has less common with Asimov books than the "I, Robot" movie

I don't mind a reasonable price hike of maybe 5%, but 43% price hike is absurd. Won't be renewing AppleTV anytime soon and if I do will be month to month. Most services are forcing me to do rotational streaming.

This makes Apple One entirely not worth it. But I'm pretty biased - I opted out of even the current pricing after being disappointed with Apple Music and Apple TV. I don't want to rant about bad software, but they really need to stick to budget pricing so long as they deliver a budget experience. The iOS and TV apps for Music and TV+ feel... low quality. Sluggish, buggy, etc.

I would expect more from a company that is in control of the entire stack at play - an Apple device, running an Apple-made app, backed by Apple-managed servers...

Anyway, very happy I didn't become attached to Apple One during the trial period.

I always got the feeling that the main purpose of the apple streaming service was creating content for their soon to be released VR headset. It's mostly original content unlike other services that mix in tons of farmed out stuff and there's a pretty big emphasis on sports with the MLS deal and almost getting the pac 12 deal. I'm interested in seeing what they co me up with when they start making VR native stuff shot using the cameras they use for sporting events. Not super surprising that they're raising the price in the lead up to the headset release I think.

I find it’s difficult to cancel an apple one trial.

I have a 6mo Apple Music trial came with the device purchase, then “upgraded” into the Apple One trial which I just activated.

Finding out that’s a bad deal to me I wanted to cancel the Apple trial and it says the subscription will be ended immediately instead of the usual claim “until the end of current billing cycle”

But after I have determined to cancel this no matter what, the result is surprising:

Your subscription is expiring soon. Your Apple One subscription expires on November 20.

This is dark.

$9.99 for apple plus vs Netflix ad plan for $8? The value proposition doesnt fit, may be Apple will start doing the starbucks model and have a bundle that will cost less (than today ) , ex Apple Plus + News = $15 sort of thing

what if they do a "pay $75" a month for iPhone and Services all included

They have that already, it's called Apple One: https://www.apple.com/apple-one/

It's how I get Apple TV+.

The have something similar currently available https://www.apple.com/apple-one/

Already canceled it last pricehike. Still using the device for watching Youtube (premium).

And torrents get more users.

Are there any numbers available for this? I am skeptical for two reasons:

(1) Torrenting is a hassle compared to the streaming services.

(2) Millenials are the only generation tech savvy enough to do that en masse and honestly who has the time?

And streaming services are hassle compared to streaming services. I just canceled my Netflix premium - it got tiring with the whole homescreen and traveling codes business

There are non-torrent streaming piracy options like TheFlixer.

(I have no idea how they pay for bandwidth.)

Still the same price. But with even more features and content.

Is Apple preparing for a loss of their Google search default revenue?

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