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After years of losses, Apple is trying to rein in their Hollywood Spending

1 cover  - Apple TV +

There is a growing sense in Hollywood and on Wall Street that Netflix has built an insurmountable lead in the streaming wars, so much so that Apple is reining in their Hollywood spending after years of losses. After spending more than $20 billion to produce original TV shows and movies that not a lot of people watch, Apple is starting to refine its strategy in Hollywood.

Based on interviews with more than a dozen people, including former employees, current employees and business partners, Apple services boss Eddy Cue has been having regular meetings with studio chiefs Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht to go over budgets, pushing them to exert more control over spending on projects.

Van Amburg and Erlicht have told some of their top creative partners that they want to change their reputation as the biggest spender in town, according to these people.

Apple doesn’t buy the most projects in Hollywood — that is still Netflix. But it splurges on individual titles. The studio spent more than $500 million combined on movies from directors Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott and Matthew Vaughn, and upward of $250 million on the World War II miniseries Masters of the Air, one of more than a dozen new series released this year.

Those pictures were all disappointments at the box office, and only Killers of the Flower Moon registered in Nielsen’s rankings of the most-popular streaming titles. Masters of the Air delivered a smaller US audience than House of Ninjas, a Netflix show in Japanese, according to Nielsen. Even so, it’s the only new Apple show this year to appear in Nielsen’s rankings.

Apple is spending billions of dollars a year on original programming that has received strong reviews and many awards nominations. But its streaming service is attracting just 0.2% of TV viewing in the US. Apple TV+ generates less viewing in one month than Netflix does in one day.

“Subscriber growth has been weak, with the platform’s original content a fraction of what rivals offer,” Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Geetha Ranganathan and Kevin Near wrote in a recent note.

Apple has largely escaped scrutiny from the press and Wall Street. The company discloses no data about its spending or the financial performance of its Hollywood operation.

Management is trying to pay less up front for shows and is quicker to cancel ones that aren’t working (see chart below). It’s forcing third-party studios to shoulder more of the burden when productions go over budget and is starting to license programming from competitors to reduce the service’s reliance on original series.

2- Time Spent streaming shows

For a lot more on this, read the full Bloomberg report.

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