Why is Apple so bad at marketing its TV shows?

Apple TV+ library is also incredibly small -- there's little excuse to go back and see what new shows are in there because there usually aren't any.

I wonder how many people are burnt out on dramas that have 8-10 episode seasons, end on a cliff hanger, and you have to wait 1-2 years for the next season. At this point, I've just stopped watching any series that isn't "done" regardless of the streaming service.

Whatever the reason may be, the article outlines a few possibilities, I do agree there is a ton of great content on Apple TV+ that people are sleeping on. I recently watched "The Morning Show", "For All Mankind", and "Presumed Innocent." All were absolutely incredible shows, and none of my friends had heard of them (people who are usually very up to date with shows) furthering that their marketing is not the best for their tv content. Ted Lasso seems to be the only show of theirs that I've felt like broke through all the noise and is most widely known.

However, I do think they have been marketing their movies a lot better. One the new movies "Wolfs" with Brad Pitt, and George Clooney had billboards all over my city. I know many people that did watch that the first week it came out.

Every time I hear about some show, what goes through my head are:

1: Do I need to buy another subscription?

2: Will I need to sit through ads?

If the answer is yes to either question, I'm not interested. I already have more TV that I want to watch than I can watch.

(I don't mind paying for shows outright, though.)

Apple TV+ generates less viewing in one month than Netflix does in one day.

(source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-21/apple-...)

> “If you’re a fan of a show on Apple TV,” says Ray, “you have this fear that it’s not being appreciated, it’s not being seen, and you have to tell people about it because the platform itself isn’t going to do it.”

I've never had this issue with Apple TV shows.

I don't know but Frog and Toad is one of my two year olds favorite shows, as is If You Give a Mouse a Cookie on Amazon. Both based on books, both really well done in my opinion.

Ted Lasso, For All Mankind, and maybe Severance aside, I'm not sure if there's much mass market awareness of Apple TV+ shows. But I'm also uncertain whether any of the streaming services aside from Netflix, Amazon Prime, (HBO) Max, Disney+, and maybe Hulu via brands like FX are able to successfully market their original content. Paramount+ maybe via Star Trek and the one-man empire that is Taylor Sheridan and his Sheridanverse (the Yellowstoneverse?), but that seems like a more limited IP stable than Disney's. There's a lot of noise, a lot of subscription fees, and a lot of losers. Apple might've produced Killers of the Flower Moon and slapped their name on Coda, but they're in a completely saturated and user-fatigued market.

This article touched on a point that I feel is very relevant: unexpected show cancellations, apparently now happening for Apple TV+, as well.

Netflix and Disney+ trained me to not even watch a show until it's concluded because it could get cancelled and I don't want to invest my small amount of free time on entertainment that might not even finish. It does produce a self-fulfilling prophecy where people with the same mindset as me on this do the same, and then the rating for something I (and probably they) are interested in aren't high enough and it gets cancelled.

What should worry them, though, is that it also led to the final step for them; I cancelled my Netflix and Disney+ subscriptions with no intention of renewing them around a year ago. The end result is that "TV series"-style shows are effectively dead to me; I've shifted my time on them mostly to novels (that are basically behind-the-curve on this trend, hopefully forever), followed by single-player video games, and finally movies. (Why didn't movies take the first slot? Because I'm only willing/able to give 30-60 minutes of continuous time to entertainment most of the time, and it's very unsatisfying to pause a movie to resume later.)

The continuous, immediate feedback on series performance coupled with a reputation of acting on that feedback immediately is killing the traditional television medium.

On top of all of that, Apple TV+ has the added albatross of requiring their hardware for the shows, as if they were somehow a siren song to get people more tightly nestled into their ecosystem, and therefore dooming their shows to failure, at least amongst people who don't want to pay for overpriced hardware running software of degrading quality over the years (I switched to Linux in 2016 because it was more reliable than my MacBook Air; being better than Windows isn't good enough anymore, especially when Linux has a greater catalog of software these days).

The needs of Apple, Inc weigh on their Apple TV division, they don't help it, and the sins of the streaming services against actually finishing a story further increase the trust deficit with Apple TV+. No amount of marketing is going to turn that around.

The walled garden certainly keeps me out of the apple ecosystem. I love MacOS but I don't want to pay a premium for vendor lock-in and I infer that most (if not all) apple products are double-edged in that manner.

They also made a massive deal with MLS that led to Messi coming to the US, and they've done a terrible job of getting an mainstream attention for that, even though it's a _great_ viewing experience -- you can watch every game, including 4 games at the same time if you want, and rewatch them whenever you want and the production quality is decent.

If nothing else, they should be doing a full court press to get newspapers and ESPN etc to increase their coverage of MLS, even the Miami Herald is barely covering soccer and Miami is full of soccer fans and the team just set the all time single season points record and has one of the greatest athletes of all time on the field.

Their content is OK outside the MLS deal.

I will get roasted for this, but I enjoyed Foundation. Decent sci-fi with some cool visuals and interesting concepts. It just had nothing to do with the actual books.

Maybe Apple should hold a yearly event building hype for their new and ongoing shows. That's by far spots Apple's best marketing channel for every other product they have

From my limited experience with Apple TV (Master of the Air and whatever that terrible Nasa one was) they seem to suffer from the same problem as most throw away TV shows on the streaming services - They lack writers who know anything about the subject matter and they couldn't care less about attention to detail.

They attempt to cash in on the emotional value of these dramatic events without doing the legwork required to do it properly and so it falls flat upon its face.

Is there yet a convenient way to watch Apple TV with Chromecast?

Well, to start, their TV shows are pretty terrible.

If anyone wants the ultimate case study in failed Apple business expansions, go back and watch the March 2019 event (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZmBoMZFC8g).

Apple TV+, Apple Card, Apple News+, and Apple Arcade where all launched there. All have been, for Apple's size and scale, business debacles. Apple TV+'s debacles are well documented in this post, Apple Card is in the news today for incompetence (and has lost billions from Goldman Sachs, and has never launched outside the US), Apple News+ is doing okay with 19 million subscribers, and Apple Arcade has caused no shortage of public publisher ire (#1).

Edit for #1:

Apple Arcade has been a dumpster fire on the backend...

https://appleinsider.com/articles/24/07/31/apple-arcade-deve...

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/10/08/ex-app-store-head...

https://mobilegamer.biz/inside-apple-arcade-axed-games-decli...

https://mobilegamer.biz/inside-apple-arcade-again-late-payme...

I agree that Apple isn't great about marketing it's shows, but part of the issue is that their shows just aren't that good. I imagine if you're into the Apple ecosystem, you probably get ads for them, but from the outside, it's crickets. I subscribed literally for Ted Lasso and have debated canceling every month since I finished it.

apple tv tv shows are generally bad, neutered "content"

Apple has always been kind of not great at marketing, simply because their attitude has always been "the product markets itself."

That isn't to say they don't, it's just a cultural attitude inside the company. It's a crying shame because their content teams have obviously great taste and are willing to experiment, and they must be pulling their hair out over this, but yeah – AAPL should not only do more and better marketing, but consider licensing their content out in a limited fashion to draw people in, especially if they're going to maintain 'the product markets itself' – I can still buy iPods in BEst Buy, for an example.

People WANT apple to succeed on this content front. The Apple Vision program especially would benefit from high quality content, well-marketed, especially to drive adoption and thus reduce cost; amazing immersive/interactive content is the killer app for AR/VR if you ask me.

Let silly Zuck make dumb avatars and fake lowbrow games, if I'm going to project content directly onto my eyeballs, let it be Oscar-worthy.