Apple planning to make original TV shows and movies as hardware sales soften

This could be a very good move, but while becoming popular with original content is not difficult, making more money could be. This splintering of content is making it more expensive for consumers - buy an Amazon Prime/Video subscription for all Amazon original content, buy a Netflix subscription for all Netflix original content, buy an Apple Music subscription for all Apple original content...

Hopefully these big companies will have the sense to come together in the future and start cross selling at least some of their older/aged content on the other competing services. Perhaps not the very best or the newest in their individual lineups, but others (just like this is handled across TV networks). Every service wanting to become the primary aggregator of streaming content won't work well for consumers.

There's another version of the story on MacRumors:

http://www.macrumors.com/2017/01/12/apple-original-tv-shows-...

There, in terms of just what they're considering, they note "Apple executives have told Hollywood that the new original content will launch by the end of 2017, according to the new report. In terms of specific genres, HBO's Westworld and Netflix's Stranger Things were both used as comparisons for what Apple is aiming to produce on Apple Music."

Personally, I'm encouraged to see this, with the same caveat as newscracker raises - we're already in a fragmented media landscape, and this will only add to that syndrome. However, it seems inescapable, for now, with broadcasters remaining sufficiently intransigent for Apple's plans for a TV bundle suitable for cord-cutters to have been scuppered. Producing their own material gives them the same prime benefit as Netflix and HBO enjoy: full control over how broadly it's available, which in Apple's case, I'd fully expect to be uniformly global.

Perhaps we might yet see more big-budget sci-fi on TV - ah, would that Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep" could finally see such treatment!

Everyone needs a laser printer.