Apple TV+ Has Great Content but Weirdly Poor Marketing

Apple TV+ is my weirdest subscription service. I only subscribed to watch Foundation, but stuck around for all the other great shows. Shows I would never have known about if I wasn’t a sci-fi nerd. For a company that’s a marketing giant, Apple TV+ is weirdly mishandled, don’t you think?

The Apple TV+ Lineup Is Small but Mighty

If you look at the list of Apple TV+ originals and original films and documentaries, you’re looking at around 200 of the former, and about half that number for the latter. Compare that to Netflix, where over half of the US Netflix library now consists of Netflix Original content. That means Netflix isn’t far short of having nearly 4000 original titles.

So Apple’s lineup is tiny compared to the big dogs, but their approach is certainly quality over quantity. Apple is focusing on making prestige TV and films, and it really shows in the current programs. Just watch Silo, Foundation, Masters of the Air, or really anything they’ve produced and there’s no denying the production and writing is top-notch.

While services like Netflix have no shortage of wonderful original programming, the vast majority of it (in my opinion, of course) is mediocre. I don’t think if we measured programming caliber-for-caliber, the comparative libraries would be so different in size.

There’s More Content Than You’d Think

When I tallied up all the programming for Apple TV+ just now, I bet you were completely surprised that there’s actually that much of it. I think the average person probably has the idea in their head that Apple TV+ has perhaps a few dozen shows spread across various genres. I can’t blame you, since until I actually went and looked for a complete list, I had no idea either. I’ve never even heard of 90% of those shows, and even the most high-profile successes, like Ted Lasso simply don’t have much share of the streaming audience mindspace.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t recall seeing much marketing for any Apple TV+ programming, not even the relatively famous stuff. There was nothing on my Twitter feed, nor on Facebook. I don’t see it in targeted ads, and you had better believe that Google and Meta know I’m a voracious consumer of TV. This is obviously anecdotal, but I’d like to hear from you in the comments on how often and how much you’ve seen marketing for Apple TV+. It’s possible that I’ve somehow ended up in the eye of the storm, but I think that’s unlikely.

The App Doesn’t Show You the Good Stuff

Apple has been pretty good at handing out free trial subscriptions over the years. When I bought my last Mac, I got a lengthy included sub, and when I bought my first PlayStation 5, I got another six months on top of that. So they already had me over the initial hurdle, in their app, and ready to watch the best they have to offer.

The only problem is, you’d never think there were hundreds of shows or dozens of movies to watch just by landing on the home screen of the Apple TV+ app. Whatever you might think of Netflix’s programming quality, let it never be said that their app isn’t efficient at funneling people towards exactly the sort of stuff they’d want to watch. With the Apple TV+ app, I feel like I’m sort of left to dig around by myself, and while I appreciate not being pushed around, I also don’t enjoy being left stranded in the middle of an unfamiliar place.

I Only Find Good Stuff Through Word of Mouth

Almost everything I’ve watched and enjoyed on Apple TV+ only happened because someone else talked about it online or in my real life. I would never have discovered Severance if someone on my social media didn’t rave about it. Ditto for Silo and Masters of the Air. In the case of Masters of the Air, I had no idea it even existed, despite being essentially a spiritual successor to Band of Brothers, one of my all-time favorite titles.

Apple will apparently scale down its spending on production because it’s failing to get viewers and loses money on its streaming service, but I think if the company actually spent some of that money on marketing, people would love their programming because it’s ultimately a great product, which no one knows about.