Copyright The Hollywood Reporter
Amid all the chatter surrounding the future of Warner Bros. Discovery, one company has been noted over and over again as a possible buyer, even as management has remained silent: Apple. The tech giant’s Apple TV service remains a smaller player in a sea of streaming giants and wannabe giants, and speculation has been rampant that the Warner Bros. film and TV studios, as well as HBO, could help it turbocharge its ambitions in entertainment. At the same time, Apple TV is the only major streaming service that does not have an advertising-supported tier. While Apple does sell ads on live sports like MLS and (soon) Formula 1, it has steerd clear of the strategy embraced by everyone else of selling a lower-priced tier with ads. Eddy Cue, the Apple executive tasked with overseeing the company;’s burgeoning services business, appeared to shoot down both possibilities in an interview this week with Screen International alongside Apple TV chiefs Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg. When pressed with Apple TV has plans in the pipeline for an ad tier, Cue responded “nothing at this time. “Again, I don’t want to say no forever, but there are no plans,” he continued. “If we can stay aggressive with our pricing, it’s better for consumers not to get interrupted with ads.” And shortly thereafter, when asked whether Apple would make a bid for WBD, A24 or Disney, Cue was similarly dismissive. “Same answer as before, but you’ve got to look at Apple from a historical point of view,” he said. “We don’t do a lot of major acquisitions. We do very small acquisitions in general, not related to Apple TV, so I don’t see that happening because we like what we’re doing. We’re building and we’ll continue building from that.” Apple’s biggest acquisition ever was the $3 billion deal for Beats in 2014, a deal that would is tiny compared to WBD, which is reportedly seeking north of $60 billion. Apple has been making moves recently to bolster Apple TV, including a bundle with NBCUniversal’s Peacock, that $750 million F1 deal, and moves to try and make the service more accessible to consumers. But there may be a limit to its efforts, as Cue suggests. Apple has the cash of course, but it also has the tech company ethos of building rather than buying. It’s a philosophy shared by Netflix, though even the streaming giant has reportedly hired a bank to take a peek at WBD’s books. “We come from a deep heritage of being builders rather than buyers. I also think that one should have a reasonable amount of skepticism around big media mergers, they don’t have an amazing track record over the history of time,” Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters said last month, before hedging by adding “I would say it’s our responsibility to evaluate all our options.” Microsoft, of course, has never been shy about big splashy M&A, with Activision Blizzard and LinkedIn among its more recent deca-billion dollar deals. Amazon, likewise, has been willing to buy to give it scale in a space, from MGM to Whole Foods. But Apple? Despite being among the biggest companies in the world, with a market cap of nearly $4 trillion and more than $55 billion of cash on hand, it has never been one to do the sort of deals that its competitors have done, and Cue’s comments suggest that it has no plans on changing that.
