Eddy Cue, Apple’s chief of Internet Software and Services and one of its most important negotiators with Hollywood producers and studios, has made some interesting comments regarding Apple’s TV efforts during his trip to India.
In an interview with India’s business newspaper Mint, Cue said that—contrary to popular belief—the iPhone maker is doing some “future stuff that we haven’t talked about” in terms of original content production and television.
He says Apple has been way faster to get involved in TV entertainment than people give it credit for, adding they’ll bring things to the TV space “that are unique to us.”
Here’s the full quote:
We’re doing some future stuff that we haven’t talked about, around it. We’ll talk more as we have more to say… I don’t think it’s about us disrupting it. The reality is that it’s going to get disrupted whether we do it or not. It’s already started and we think we can do things that are innovative and we’ll bring things to that ecosystem and platform that are unique to us. That’s the opportunity.
So, has Apple missed the bus with content and entertainment?
The way we look at this is the majority of customers get their content from a satellite or cable television service or antenna. That’s true in most places in the world. And though there have been some new things that have come in, that’s still the predominant way. That predominant way I believe is going to change over the next 10 years significantly.
With a lot of changes come different opportunities because they’ll be replaced by other ways to get video or they’ll be replaced by other forms of entertainment around it. And that’s the opportunity that we see. So, when you look at it today, we want to help the existing players.
So, while people will say that Apple was slower—as a matter of fact, we’ve been way faster because what we did is, we said ‘you have the content, you have a relationship with the customer, let’s make sure that your applications give access to the customer. And if you want to sell something to the customer, we’ll help you with that also because we have a mechanism that makes it really easy to pay.’
The next thing is when you have all these apps out there, you really want to have a centralized way. That’s where the TV app comes from. I think we’ve been addressing the things that are in the market today. Your question, bottomline, falls into Netflix.
The executive reiterated that Apples sees India as a very long-term opportunity and said that Apple Pay is something that “we definitely want” there.
Apple’s head of Apple Pay, Jennifer Bailey, is with Cue in India, but they wouldn’t reveal when the mobile payments service might launch in the country.
“The challenge with payment mechanisms is that there isn’t really a lot of global scale. You deal with individual markets at a time,” Cue said. “But India is one of those markets where we hope to bring Apple Pay to.”
“We’re working on it, but no date to announce at this point,” he teased. “We like to announce a date that we know is a 100 percent.”
Image: Cue in his Cupertino office, via The Hollywood Reporter