Apple TV+ is making great content — so why is no one watching?

After spending $20 billion on shows and movies since it launched, Apple TV+ gets fewer views in one month than Netflix gets in a day — despite the fact that the streamer is making some truly great content.

Now, according to a Bloomberg report, Apple is planning to cut back on its massive TV spending. Vulture TV critic Kathryn VanArendonk talks about the decision, and whether it's a decisive loss in the streaming wars.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: What do we know about Apple making this decision to reduce the spending on movies and TV?

Kathryn: We don't have a lot of information as far as what this means specifically. The language is sort of, "We're going to be looking at the budgets. We're going to be thinking about how to spend less in this category." But it is not the kind of announcement like, "We will be cutting this percentage," or "We will be making this many fewer shows." So there's a lot of grey area about what this actually means.

But the other thing that we do know is that they have quite a lot of budget to cut, if they decide to. They had to buy their way into the streaming wars kind of late in the game, after Netflix and all of these other competitors were already out there, and that was not a cheap purchase for them. They have spent all this money on expensive shows, so there's a lot of money that they could cut back if they wanted to.

Elamin: What's your read on why they have to rein in all the spending?

Kathryn: Well, there are a couple different reasons why this is probably something they should be doing. One of them is that we have very little sense of how many people watch any of these shows. We know through these secondary measures — outside firms like Parrot Analytics or Nielsen do their own sort of measuring how many people watch — but Apple has never released any of their inner data about how many people actually watch, and more importantly what it means for them as far as, like, "If this many people watch this show, then that's good for our business," because they don't sell advertising to it. We have no information about how much money those subscribers are actually paying, because they give all these different deals to get into Apple TV+, or whether they watch Apple shows and then buy Apple products; we don't know.

Elamin: We don't know what show is a success for them.

Kathryn: No, we really have no idea. And so it's not at all surprising that this would be a thing they need to go about doing, especially because they're so bad at promoting their shows. So few people know they exist.

Elamin: This has been the frustrating thing about loving a lot of these Apple TV+ shows, because they're honestly so good. They've made a lot of excellent TV shows in the last little while. And then according to this recent report in Bloomberg, Apple TV+ has 0.2 per cent of TV viewing audiences in the United States. That's incredibly tiny…. We know that Apple has the capacity to promote them doing all kinds of stuff. Why aren't they getting the message out about the stuff that they have on their streaming network?

Kathryn: Yeah, it's really baffling. I can guess a little bit. One is they have a lot of marketing budget behind hardware; they clearly have not done the same kind of investment in these product shows. And I think part of the reason is that there is this disconnect between whether it matters to this company that anyone watches that particular show. So it's just not something they've invested in.

The other thing is that they are still releasing stuff that was made two or three years ago. And so when there is this huge lapse between the development of something and the release, the people who made it may not be there anymore, the mission has changed since you made it … and so there's this big gap between when there was excitement about making a show and how to actually put money behind promoting it.

Elamin: The confusing thing to me about it is that there was a moment where everyone said, "The internet is disrupting music," and Apple said, "We have an answer for that." Now we're at this moment where the internet is disrupting television, and I would have assumed maybe that Apple would also have an answer for that — and that does not appear to be the case. Is that surprising to you?

Kathryn: It is surprising to me, largely because of how good they are promoting themselves in other places. But the other thing you really cannot escape is that people want to watch television on the internet, and apparently this is a thing Apple decided it needed to be involved in for not a lot of reasons. I'm glad that they did it because I like so many of these shows, but they had no reason to make this a part of their portfolio. It was just funneling money down a black hole, with the promise that at some point it would matter. They have never figured out how to actually make that matter…. There is a real disconnect, I think, between how people want to watch this. Not that we should all be making DVDs out here, but at some point you've got to get to the people where they are.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Kathryn VanArendonk produced by Jess Low.