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Does anybody want a thread of analysis/perspective on the Apple event today? Is that still a thing we do? What if I promise it'll all be very insightful & valuable?
Ok! Some fun quick takes: it’s important to understand the difference in annual revenue (ARPU) that different tech/media companies make from their users. Comcast or Verizon make an order of magnitude more dollars from you each year than Netflix does. Apple wants to be up there.
As a natural result of this tension, Apple is now competing with Disney for the first time. Apple’s subscription content services will be in a zero-sum competition with Disney+. It’s a schism akin to when Apple found out Google was building Android.
Very few businesses succeed in both expensive, recurring subscriptions and in high-margin, big-ticket consumer offerings. Disney has the ability to sell you a costly theme park ticket, and will add a monthly subscription. Now it seems Apple hopes your MacBook is their Disneyland.
There’s a chance here for Apple to make the mega-bundle of every monthly charge they can extract from you: financing for your iPhone + iCloud + AppleCare + Apple Music + Video streaming + “Tapestry” news. But it seems unlikely they’d be willing to “cross the streams” in that way.
Without the tying of Apple’s wildly disparate businesses together into one high-price subscription, it’ll be hard for Apple to convince Wall St its hardware businesses are as reliable as an annuity. The ideal solution to this would have been if Apple had a social network. But 🙃.
My former colleagues at @activateinc really explained the future of video streaming well by explaining how people will stacking multiple streaming subscriptions together, to a limit. So Apple has to get in now. (From Activate's most recent annual deck: slideshare.net/ActivateInc/ac… ) 
And maybe the even bigger story is the lock-in effect of owning a younger consumer's digital spending.
