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
Published
March 21, 2018