#SXSW Featured Session Notes: Eddy Cue

Eddy Cue made an appearance at SXSW to talk about Apple News and Apple's views of their own responsibilities in the space.

A few points I took away from his positioning around curating news:

• Curation is necessary: we have a responsibility to our readers and to society to exercise judgment in what we publish or push out.
• Free speech is one thing, but bigoted or unsafe speech idoesn't need to be protected on Apple's platforms.
• "Nobody is completely free - we all draw lines- there's no pornography on these slides, there are no bomb-making apps on our store"

Why not a big acquisition - Apple could afford to buy Disney or Netflix... ?

• We don't do big acquisitions. Partly because they're big and complicated.? But also: we want to skate to where the puck will be in the future.
• In other words, he's arguing that if a company is huge, effectively that's where the puck is already. Let those companies go after current state, while Apple pursues future state.
• Focusing on quality not quantity (an old Apple line, but likely how they actually think about it, whether or not you agree with their definition of quality)
• Interesting that Apple views Youtube as dominating the 2-8 minute market for video, and acknowledging that content like Game of Thrones just doesn't fit in that format, though lots of how-to content does, or an 8 minute car review.

When asked about AR / VR, Eddy's responses were interesting:

• Tech like this starts out slowly.? The tools are tough to use, and there isn't much of a market - not many devices that can run the software.
• So Apple first lowers the cost / difficulty of building AR/VR applications with a great API kit (ARKit)
• Second, Apple makes sure the APIs work backward to the phones that are already on the market - thus ensuring that you have 100's of millions of customers on a single market and platform to consume those AR/VR applications.

Below are two clips - the first is 4 minutes or so on Netflix, and the second is the sound track from the entire talk, with just snapshot pictures rather than video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaA0mPVAsHI