Yahoo Finance Apple's Tim Cook has been saying the exact same thing about TV for years
In Apple’s (AAPL) fourth quarter earnings call yesterday, CEO Tim Cook dropped a pretty big hint about Apple joining one of the buzziest areas in business—television.
“I would confirm that television has intense interest with me and many other people here,” Cook said on the call. “In terms of owning content and creating content, we have started with focusing on some original content, as you point out. We’ve got a few things going there that we’ve talked about. And I think it’s a great opportunity for us both from a creation point of view and an ownership point of view. And so it’s is an area that we’re focused on.”
Apple has been adjacent and connected to television since 2007—literally, with Apple TV through an HDMI cord—but hasn’t yet gone down the route of producing its own network and cable-like content in earnest like iTunes’ competitors Amazon (AMZN), Netflix (NFLX), and Hulu. It did however, announce in March that it was working on a show with musician will.i.am about apps called “Planet of the Apps.” In August Gwyneth Paltrow joined the project as well. It’s hard to know how ambitious an unscripted show about apps is, but an Oscar-winner could lend it some heft.
But while Cook talks of this content focus, analysts aren’t impressed. Shortly after the earnings call, BTIG’s Walt Piecyk tweeted a video he and fellow analyst Rich Greenfield had made, showing Cook using the same “intense interest” phrase over the years when talking about television. And the video was made in 2012.
$AAPL TV quotes over the years. #intenseinterest CC: @richbtighttps://t.co/aBVjXWEH7z
— Walt Piecyk (@WaltBTIG) October 25, 2016
Of course, past performance is no guarantee of anything. This week’s earnings call instance could be very much genuine, given the slumping sales of Apple products in a saturated market as well as uninspiring products like the Apple Watch that just aren’t duplicating the booms of previous Apple successes. On top of that, Apple’s reported interest in Time Warner shows the company may finally be serious about getting a piece of the content pie.
But don’t get the wrong idea, BTIG’s Greenfield, the video’s co-creator, says.
“We continue to wait for them to do something meaningful,” he told Yahoo Finance in a phone call. “They don’t seem terribly serious in investing in media content in a big way.” In Greenfield’s mind, ponying up for a show about apps isn’t much for the world’s biggest company. “[It’s not] spending money on content like ‘House of Cards’ and ‘Game of Thrones’ let alone stepping up and buying $80 million media companies.”
For Apple, such a move might seem like it makes sense given they have the content delivery system. But Greenfield says people aren’t thinking of Time Warner’s whole business, which is far more than just HBO and Warner Brothers.
“The rest of Time Warner is Turner, legacy linear cable TV networks. AT&T can digest those,” he said. In Greenfield’s view, you have to ask the question: does Apple really want to be in the business of old-fashioned TV? “I think it’d be hard to imagine Apple or Google or Facebook being a meaningful player in the legacy linear TV business that frustrates consumers. It seems backward looking for companies.”
Apple’s content strategy aside, it’s good to remember that Tim Cook’s “intense interest” doesn’t always mean what you think it means. As Greenfield put it, after reading scores of reports jumping on the news, “it’s nice they’re making the comments but it doesn’t mean anything is going to happen.”
Ethan Wolff-Mann is a writer at Yahoo Finance focusing on consumerism, tech, and personal finance. Follow him on Twitter @ewolffmann.
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