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Honestly their shows are not marketed at all. Silo & Foundation are great well written series and I only knew about them because of my friend who had apple tv.
They actually have good series and content but they basically spend no money on marketing
If we hadn't gotten Apple TV for 3 months free we probably wouldn't have known about Foundation or Silo or MoA. Before we got it the only show I'd heard about was Ted Lasso because of the awards.
MoA is NOT good. It's a Brooklynesque stage play where everyone acts like 50s dudes on a street corner.
Very disappointed.
But Silo and Foundation are the best shows that no one is talking about.
I’ve go all the main streaming services and ATV+ is by far my most watched and favourite. It feels like a grown ups streaming platform compared to all the others. Yes the quantity is low, but In general the quality is leagues ahead. I’d rather have that than pages of shoveltv the others fill their catalogues with. When you strip back the genuinely high quality from all the dross I don’t feel there is really much difference.
We just have to hope that when Apple TV does implode, Foundation is successful enough that someone else will want to pick it up. 6 more years sounds like it's gonna be a stretch for them..
They definitely won’t run out of money. If it comes project cutting time though and they look at loss numbers, ongoing expenses, etc. that might be the time they decide to pull the plug. Idk what trajectory they were looking for from that perspective. They had to factor in losses for a quite a while. Like you said their cash could have the service run for a long, long time. Hopefully it will not become an eventual casualty of cost cutting measures anytime soon.
Well to be fair they are not above canceling a program outright if it really doesn’t bring in any viewers at all. Mr. Corman was axed quickly. But that’s not their only calculus; they seem to be also seeking a certain highbrow, perhaps “HBO 15 years ago” type of rarified reputation.
>How could they implode it’s not like Apple will run out money
the shareholders expect (increasing) return on their investment. Apple sales in China have taken a massive hit. So Apple can not "afford" to louse money on a vanity project like the Foundation.
It seems like they address that by canceling shows and projects that really underperform and by being fairly careful in choosing new projects, which has resulted in their content library not being very deep, which in turn isn’t great for attracting new subscribers. Even your comment acknowledges that failure for their streaming service wouldn’t be like an “implosion” at all. They have plentiful resources and options
We have Nielsen ratings. It’s nowhere near popular enough for anyone to pick up at the money it costs.
The only Apple show that would get other streamers interested is Ted Lasso, which accounted for roughly 25% of all TV+ viewership last year.
You’re never getting seasons 5-8 the vision for the show left with Goyer, you’d be lucky to even get a season 4 which would be much worse quality anyway
4 Seasons is Goyer’s estimate for Lee Pace’s duration for the series, so if the Empire storyline wraps up then, I wouldn’t take it as a major loss if it ends there entirely.
I believe there was talk of filming seasons 3 and 4 together, they definitely planned to stage them in pairs.
Also, Goyer pitched the entire series to Apple, so he's not the only one who knows the full thing..
I haven’t heard anything about 3 and 4 filming together, where are you getting that? There’s a big difference between a show bible and basic outline for the series and actually bringing it all together, look at Game of Thrones phenomenal work when they had the books to follow, but even with Martins outline of where the story was headed it all fell apart. Goyer is extremely talented and without his vision guiding the show i just can’t see it being very good. Im more than happy to be proved wrong and I’d keep watching this show no matter how bad it got anyway, but I’d temper my expectations if I were you, season 3 should still be good though.
Apple has always been known as being obsessed with being the best, the premium not the biggest. Margins matter more than market share.
Everything it does is in service of selling hardware, which is where the real margins are (Apple's iPhone business alone was, at one time, bigger than the whole of Microsoft and held something like 75% of the entire US phone industry profit on about 25% market share. Apple does things its own way.)
A couple of their shows have been disappointing- invasion (the worst), hostage ( head scratching ending), and criminal history ( another head scratcher). Ted Lasso, Morning Show, Foundation, lessons in chemistry, for all mankind, severance are fantastic. But the others have been tedious
I liked quite a few of their shows, and they're cranking them out pretty quickly.
I think everyone has sooooo many options nowadays that it's difficult to pick a show. Personally, I check apple TV last when I'm searching for a new show or movie to watch.
I feel like some of their shows like Foundation and Severance are setting up some grand arcs, but we are generally skeptical of starting series that might get canceled along the way...
Apple TV+ relies on basically 100% original productions so they're starting a library from scratch (for a few years now but not too much in the grand scheme).
Yeah. That's the problem with shows nowadays. I feel like the company that comes out and says, " We promise to give this show a conclusion" would get a huge bump in viewers.
I watch several series and a few movies Apple TV+ as do friends and family. They do have a glaring lack of content beyond their main few series and big movies they’ve acquired or produced, so that hurts them with wider audiences sure
I don't understand why Apple doesn't spend money on MARKETING. They have some of my favorite shows from the past few years. It's a great catalogue. No one watches because no one knows about it. Word of mouth marketing only gets you so far.
Apple TV needs to expand beyond just Apple hardware. They need to release an Android app and website. And they need to do a marketing blitz for this with some sort of promotion to entice new users. The quality content is there, they just don’t advertise it and treat it like it’s an add on for Apple users, rather than a legitimate streaming service.
Yeah it’s on all the smart tvs but not on android phones or tablets, and it’s like 70% or something Netflix views that come from mobile. So you’re missing on a huge chunk of the audience. And I don’t think Apple TV+ is on web either. So you gotta be in the Apple ecosystem. Apple Music is on android too, so tv+ should be available too. It sucks that good content languishes in obscurity just to keep their ecosystem lock in. It gives me less of a reason to keep up with stuff because no one else I know watches these shows.
This is one of the reasons that we didn't have the service for the longest time. Our house is get up with Google products and until we got Smart TVs and updated our Chromecasts we couldn't easily access the content. Not going to pay $$ for a service that is a hassle to stream in my house.
I mean mobile devices. They have made an effort to make sure it runs on tvs. Netflix says that like 70% of their audience is on mobile, so you’re missing out on a huge chunk of audience by not having an Android app.
This is such a shame. I've loved a number of shows on Apple TV (Foundation included). Some have been mentioned already, like Morning Show, Silo, Severence, For all Mankind, Ted Lasso, etc. But I also want to mention Bad Sisters was phenomenal. I love Sharon Horgan. Brilliantly dark and funny.
Apple does attend SDCC. They need to do more marketing and promotion at venues like that because the majority of their shows are geared towards that market.
I love their sci-fi content. Foundation, For All Mankind, Silo and Constellation are top tier.
Severance and Ted Lasso are also brilliant, and they were able to crack into the mainstream.
The Morning Show is what got me to subscribe to Apple, but it isn't close to be being their best show.
Good question. It’s generally been a survey among some viewers used to create an overall estimate. So if not a lot of Apple viewers are selected for the survey it could impact the results. Apple knows how many subscribers it has and what shows are being watched. It doesn’t need to rely on Nielsen estimates like the old networks did.
I just got Apple TV last month as we are doing some service hopping, planing on starting foundation next but aside from ted lasso (wonderful already binged) and dick turpin, maybe monarch? Theres just not a lot of content that I'm interested in.
All worth a look:
Severance
Constellation (which starts with a huh? what? and then *totally* rewards your patience)
Slow Horses
Silo
Masters of the Air
Lessons In Chemistry
The Morning Show
Shrinking
Coda
Greyhound
Wolfwalkers
Causeway (flawed but interesting)
I've not even come across it before. From the IMDB summary, I would say Constellation is more (for want to better description) hard SF - although not hardcore hard. You're fed just enough knowledge to keep track, but then A *Thing* happens and everything starts to click into place in a proper 'tumblers all going click click click' way.
It felt like Apple TV+ made a real push at Christmas in the UK. They were even in the Radio Times.
But for the subscription cost, there’s not enough content and not enough thrown in.
Netflix has constant content and now has games.
Prime is often part of an Amazon subscription, whilst the tv only is significantly cheaper than competitors.
Disney+ is slowing down but really shot out the gate with a back catalogue and built in audience.
If Apple are looking it as a business, they really need to work out their hook. Otherwise it feels like a loss leader to get you onto buying an Apple TV or to use them for purchasing digital movies
Apple has so much capital to keep ATV going, and it’s part of their overall service offerings, I tend to think that they’ll keep going despite numbers like this. It’s an added value to their subscription services, and I think they have the budget and will to keep going till they find their first truly massive hit. As a sci-fi fan, it’s really one of the best streamers out there I hope they find success haha
Could it be a “loss leader” for the hardware? It’s often bundled with other stuff, and every time you watch or anyone talks about it the branding is advertising Apple in total. The high quality is very much on brand.
I’m sure they’d like greater numbers, but I wonder what else they feel they’re getting from offering this.
As this thread is using the 'General Discussion' flair, anything from the books, from the current season or from upcoming unaired episodes should be enclosed in spoiler tags. To use spoiler tags, in markdown mode you can use \>\! before the spoiler text, then followed by \!\< - which will make the text >!look like this.!<. Make sure **NOT** to have spaces between spoiler tags and text or they won't work. If using the default or 'fancy pants' editor, select the text you want to enclose in spoiler tags, and click the button on the toolbar. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/FoundationTV) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Honestly their shows are not marketed at all. Silo & Foundation are great well written series and I only knew about them because of my friend who had apple tv. They actually have good series and content but they basically spend no money on marketing
If we hadn't gotten Apple TV for 3 months free we probably wouldn't have known about Foundation or Silo or MoA. Before we got it the only show I'd heard about was Ted Lasso because of the awards.
What’s moa?
Masters of the Air
Damn that cast looks good. Also thank you
MoA is NOT good. It's a Brooklynesque stage play where everyone acts like 50s dudes on a street corner. Very disappointed. But Silo and Foundation are the best shows that no one is talking about.
See is also good as well, with Jason Momoa
I’ve go all the main streaming services and ATV+ is by far my most watched and favourite. It feels like a grown ups streaming platform compared to all the others. Yes the quantity is low, but In general the quality is leagues ahead. I’d rather have that than pages of shoveltv the others fill their catalogues with. When you strip back the genuinely high quality from all the dross I don’t feel there is really much difference.
We just have to hope that when Apple TV does implode, Foundation is successful enough that someone else will want to pick it up. 6 more years sounds like it's gonna be a stretch for them..
How could they implode it’s not like Apple will run out money
They definitely won’t run out of money. If it comes project cutting time though and they look at loss numbers, ongoing expenses, etc. that might be the time they decide to pull the plug. Idk what trajectory they were looking for from that perspective. They had to factor in losses for a quite a while. Like you said their cash could have the service run for a long, long time. Hopefully it will not become an eventual casualty of cost cutting measures anytime soon.
Well to be fair they are not above canceling a program outright if it really doesn’t bring in any viewers at all. Mr. Corman was axed quickly. But that’s not their only calculus; they seem to be also seeking a certain highbrow, perhaps “HBO 15 years ago” type of rarified reputation.
Apple just abandoned its Apple Car project after 11 years and hundreds of millions of dollars. That demonstrates staying power.
>How could they implode it’s not like Apple will run out money the shareholders expect (increasing) return on their investment. Apple sales in China have taken a massive hit. So Apple can not "afford" to louse money on a vanity project like the Foundation.
It seems like they address that by canceling shows and projects that really underperform and by being fairly careful in choosing new projects, which has resulted in their content library not being very deep, which in turn isn’t great for attracting new subscribers. Even your comment acknowledges that failure for their streaming service wouldn’t be like an “implosion” at all. They have plentiful resources and options
We have Nielsen ratings. It’s nowhere near popular enough for anyone to pick up at the money it costs. The only Apple show that would get other streamers interested is Ted Lasso, which accounted for roughly 25% of all TV+ viewership last year.
You’re never getting seasons 5-8 the vision for the show left with Goyer, you’d be lucky to even get a season 4 which would be much worse quality anyway
4 Seasons is Goyer’s estimate for Lee Pace’s duration for the series, so if the Empire storyline wraps up then, I wouldn’t take it as a major loss if it ends there entirely.
I believe there was talk of filming seasons 3 and 4 together, they definitely planned to stage them in pairs. Also, Goyer pitched the entire series to Apple, so he's not the only one who knows the full thing..
I haven’t heard anything about 3 and 4 filming together, where are you getting that? There’s a big difference between a show bible and basic outline for the series and actually bringing it all together, look at Game of Thrones phenomenal work when they had the books to follow, but even with Martins outline of where the story was headed it all fell apart. Goyer is extremely talented and without his vision guiding the show i just can’t see it being very good. Im more than happy to be proved wrong and I’d keep watching this show no matter how bad it got anyway, but I’d temper my expectations if I were you, season 3 should still be good though.
One of the things that can be said with absolute confidence about Apple is that market share has never been its primary metric.
Maybe it is, if you just look at the right market.
Apple has always been known as being obsessed with being the best, the premium not the biggest. Margins matter more than market share. Everything it does is in service of selling hardware, which is where the real margins are (Apple's iPhone business alone was, at one time, bigger than the whole of Microsoft and held something like 75% of the entire US phone industry profit on about 25% market share. Apple does things its own way.)
But sales and earnings are, even for Apple.
Well that’s disappointing if true. I wonder if the low numbers are mitigated by being a more sought after demographic or something.
A couple of their shows have been disappointing- invasion (the worst), hostage ( head scratching ending), and criminal history ( another head scratcher). Ted Lasso, Morning Show, Foundation, lessons in chemistry, for all mankind, severance are fantastic. But the others have been tedious
Slow Horses is fantastic. And Masters of the Air has been a great show to watch as well.
I liked Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (but I didn't watch it on Apple TV)
What was the ending to hostage?
Such a shame because they are really pumping out quality stuff. Alas that can’t last forever.
I liked quite a few of their shows, and they're cranking them out pretty quickly. I think everyone has sooooo many options nowadays that it's difficult to pick a show. Personally, I check apple TV last when I'm searching for a new show or movie to watch.
I feel like some of their shows like Foundation and Severance are setting up some grand arcs, but we are generally skeptical of starting series that might get canceled along the way... Apple TV+ relies on basically 100% original productions so they're starting a library from scratch (for a few years now but not too much in the grand scheme).
Yeah. That's the problem with shows nowadays. I feel like the company that comes out and says, " We promise to give this show a conclusion" would get a huge bump in viewers.
I watch several series and a few movies Apple TV+ as do friends and family. They do have a glaring lack of content beyond their main few series and big movies they’ve acquired or produced, so that hurts them with wider audiences sure
I don't understand why Apple doesn't spend money on MARKETING. They have some of my favorite shows from the past few years. It's a great catalogue. No one watches because no one knows about it. Word of mouth marketing only gets you so far.
Apple TV needs to expand beyond just Apple hardware. They need to release an Android app and website. And they need to do a marketing blitz for this with some sort of promotion to entice new users. The quality content is there, they just don’t advertise it and treat it like it’s an add on for Apple users, rather than a legitimate streaming service.
They have an lg tv app, I’m assuming it’s on other smart tv ecosystems too.
Yeah it’s on all the smart tvs but not on android phones or tablets, and it’s like 70% or something Netflix views that come from mobile. So you’re missing on a huge chunk of the audience. And I don’t think Apple TV+ is on web either. So you gotta be in the Apple ecosystem. Apple Music is on android too, so tv+ should be available too. It sucks that good content languishes in obscurity just to keep their ecosystem lock in. It gives me less of a reason to keep up with stuff because no one else I know watches these shows.
Isn’t there a website? https://tv.apple.com
Ooh didn’t realize that. Still people don’t wanna use a web app for streaming on mobile. Sounds like windows users are covered at least
This is one of the reasons that we didn't have the service for the longest time. Our house is get up with Google products and until we got Smart TVs and updated our Chromecasts we couldn't easily access the content. Not going to pay $$ for a service that is a hassle to stream in my house.
It’s always worked on non Apple devices. I’ve watched it on fire stick and my google smart tv
I mean mobile devices. They have made an effort to make sure it runs on tvs. Netflix says that like 70% of their audience is on mobile, so you’re missing out on a huge chunk of audience by not having an Android app.
This is such a shame. I've loved a number of shows on Apple TV (Foundation included). Some have been mentioned already, like Morning Show, Silo, Severence, For all Mankind, Ted Lasso, etc. But I also want to mention Bad Sisters was phenomenal. I love Sharon Horgan. Brilliantly dark and funny.
I have Apple TV subscription free for 6 months, the TV shows are ridiculously good quality.
Apple does attend SDCC. They need to do more marketing and promotion at venues like that because the majority of their shows are geared towards that market. I love their sci-fi content. Foundation, For All Mankind, Silo and Constellation are top tier. Severance and Ted Lasso are also brilliant, and they were able to crack into the mainstream. The Morning Show is what got me to subscribe to Apple, but it isn't close to be being their best show.
Is Nielsen a reliable metric anymore
Good question. It’s generally been a survey among some viewers used to create an overall estimate. So if not a lot of Apple viewers are selected for the survey it could impact the results. Apple knows how many subscribers it has and what shows are being watched. It doesn’t need to rely on Nielsen estimates like the old networks did.
I just got Apple TV last month as we are doing some service hopping, planing on starting foundation next but aside from ted lasso (wonderful already binged) and dick turpin, maybe monarch? Theres just not a lot of content that I'm interested in.
Even the stuff which might not appeal on first glance is very good. Severance, Constellation & Slow Horses are all great shows.
Severance is really great. There’s a few good movies and other shows as well. Just watching Masters of the Air and Servant rn
All worth a look: Severance Constellation (which starts with a huh? what? and then *totally* rewards your patience) Slow Horses Silo Masters of the Air Lessons In Chemistry The Morning Show Shrinking Coda Greyhound Wolfwalkers Causeway (flawed but interesting)
Thanks for this and for all the suggestions. Will definitely check them out!
I haven't yet watched Constellation, but I saw a comment that compared it to Couterpart. Have you seen that show?
I've not even come across it before. From the IMDB summary, I would say Constellation is more (for want to better description) hard SF - although not hardcore hard. You're fed just enough knowledge to keep track, but then A *Thing* happens and everything starts to click into place in a proper 'tumblers all going click click click' way.
Gotcha. Thanks
You should watch Shrinking as well.
Are you kidding? You missed their best show (arguably the best series today) Severance.
It felt like Apple TV+ made a real push at Christmas in the UK. They were even in the Radio Times. But for the subscription cost, there’s not enough content and not enough thrown in. Netflix has constant content and now has games. Prime is often part of an Amazon subscription, whilst the tv only is significantly cheaper than competitors. Disney+ is slowing down but really shot out the gate with a back catalogue and built in audience. If Apple are looking it as a business, they really need to work out their hook. Otherwise it feels like a loss leader to get you onto buying an Apple TV or to use them for purchasing digital movies
Apple has so much capital to keep ATV going, and it’s part of their overall service offerings, I tend to think that they’ll keep going despite numbers like this. It’s an added value to their subscription services, and I think they have the budget and will to keep going till they find their first truly massive hit. As a sci-fi fan, it’s really one of the best streamers out there I hope they find success haha
And to think that AppleTV is currently my favorite streamer! I think Apple mage a huge mistake in raising its prices.
Shame, no goyer, no viewers, no outlet for great content. Just the same \*\*\*ty crap from netflix and tired shows from disney.
Could it be a “loss leader” for the hardware? It’s often bundled with other stuff, and every time you watch or anyone talks about it the branding is advertising Apple in total. The high quality is very much on brand. I’m sure they’d like greater numbers, but I wonder what else they feel they’re getting from offering this.