Apple TV+: Only £4.99 for the whole family
Apple’s streaming service will compete with the likes of Netflix, and Amazon Prime. Leif Johnson and Jason Cross report
This autumn, Apple will make a risky venture outside its familiar spheres of hardware and software when it launches Apple TV+. The new service will offer a wide assortment of TV shows funded by Apple’s mountainous cash pile, and the Cupertino company is sparing no expense in its attempt
to lure viewers with some of the best‑known actors, writers, and directors.
Below, you’ll find a round‑up of everything we know about the ambitious service.
Availability
Apple TV+ will be available from 1 November in over 100 countries, including the UK.
Price
Like Apple Arcade, the TV+ streaming service will cost £4.99 per month. Plus, when you buy an Apple product such as an iPhone or iPad, you’ll get a year of the service thrown in for free.
How to get Apple TV+
The content will be available via a redesigned TV app, and it will be possible to watch it on iPhones, iPads, Macs, Apple TV, as well as Amazon Fire TV, LG, Roku, Sony and VIZIO platforms in the future.
The app comes pre‑installed on iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and iPod touch and will soon be on Mac with macOS Catalina.
How many shows will be available at launch?
Apple is said to be spending a couple billion dollars over 2018 and 2019 on the development of exclusive original programming. That’s a lot of TV. It’s nothing compared to the $12 billion Netflix spent on content in 2018, but it’s still a very big investment. What can you get for a couple billion dollars? Apple hopes to attract
some of the best talent in TV and film production, including huge stars and directors, and to lock down the television and movie rights to best‑selling books. Though the company has only given us a glimpse at a handful of shows, the Hollywood trade press has uncovered many more through its reporting on deals from casting agents and production companies.
Here a just a few of the programmes that will be available to watch.
Amazing Stories
There aren’t a lot of companies in the world that can announce its new streaming TV service by bringing Steven Spielberg on stage to talk about how his production company (Amblin Entertainment) is going to revive one of his favourite anthologies from his youth.
The prominent director said, “The Amblin team and I will be resurrecting this 93‑year‑old brand and offering to multigenerational audiences a whole new
batch of AmazingStories. We want to transport the audience with every episode. Like the World War II pilot whose plane magically travels through space and time from the past and into the present day. Who will he meet? Can he return? Does he want to? What happens if he doesn’t?
“It’s the universal human trait to search for meaning. So in these disconnected stories, we think the audience will find that one compelling narrative that will make the first season of AmazingStories into a single thematic experience for them.”
The Morning Show
Is Apple going to air a morning talk show? Not quite.
The Morning Show is a drama about making a morning TV news show. It supposedly draws heavily from the book Top of the Morning: Inside the Cut throat World of Morning TV by Brian Stelter. This new series stars Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston, and Steve Carell, which alone is enough star power to ensure a sizable audience.
Witherspoon explained on stage at Apple’s event that the show “pulls back the curtain on the power dynamic between men and women in the high‑stakes world of a morning news show”.
See
A futuristic, post‑apocalyptic drama, See imagines a world where with no sight. A devastating virus wipes out all but a few million of the Earth’s population, and those that survived were stricken permanently blind. The series takes place hundreds of years later, where
humans have been without sight for so long that it’s disputed whether such a thing ever even really existed. The series is written by Steven Knight ( Peaky Blinders, Dirty Pretty Things) and directed by Francis Lawrence( The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Mockingjay Parts 1&2). It stars Jason Momoa ( Game of Thrones, Aquaman) and Alfre Woodard (Luke Cage, 12 Years a Slave, Captain America: Civil War ).
A recent Wall Street Journal article claims that See is costing almost $15 million per episode, making it one of the most expensive TV productions around.
Little America
Fresh off their big indie hit TheBigSick, husband‑ and‑wife team Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon
will co‑write and executive produce a new half‑hour anthology series about immigrants called LittleAmerica. They will share writing duties with Lee Eisenberg, who will serve as showrunner. Alan Yang, known as the co‑creator of MasterofNone, together with Aziz Ansari, will also executive produce the show. It will be based on the true stories of immigrants, many of which were printed in EpicMagazine’s LittleAmerica series. It will focus not on the huge famous immigrants that have made worldwide impact, but the everyday lives and struggles that we all share. “These are human stories that feature immigrants,” explained Nanjiani.
Helpsters
Big Bird took the stage at Apple’s 25 March event along with a new muppet, Cody (‘a monster who loves to help’), to introduce a new children’s series called Helpsters.
It’s an educational entertainment series aimed at preschoolers. The show is meant to help introduce toddlers to the simplest core concepts of coding as a means of helping people. The pitch is: coding helps foster collaboration and critical thinking skill, and is an “essential language that every child can learn”. The show is one of several projects in the works in collaboration with Children’s Television Workshop, but is the only one that has been announced so far.
Will Apple make movies in addition to TV shows?
Yes. According to a June report from the NewYorkPost, Apple wants to make six ‘small‑budget’ movies every
year, and it wants these films to be so good that they’ll be nominated for Academy Awards.
Apple was reportedly inspired by the stunning success of Alfonso Cuarón’s 2018 monochrome drama Roma, which won 2019 Oscars for Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best International Feature despite being made for Netflix. The company then started approaching ‘elevated’ directors in the hopes of producing Oscar‑worthy films of its own, each with a budget of around $5 million to $30 million. These Apple‑produced films would be in addition to the multi‑ year agreement Apple has with A24, the studio behind the 2016 drama Moonlight. The first film to come out of that agreement is OntheRocks, directed by Sofia Coppola and starring Bill Murray and Rashida Jones.
It’s currently not clear if Apple only plans to release these movies on Apple TV+ or if it’s seeking limited theatrical runs (as Netflix did with Roma).
Will you be able to download its programmes for offline viewing?
Yes, Apple TV+ allows users to view content both on and offline.