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Business News Digital
Apple announces student TV and music streaming bundle
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 31 October 2019
After much speculation about how Apple might bundle its new subscription services in with its existing streaming music offer, the company has announced that its all-new TV+ set-up will come free with an Apple Music subscription. For American students at least.
According to 9to5mac, US students who take out a monthly Apple Music subscription for the already discounted price of $4.99 a month will get TV+ at no extra charge.
Given that a TV+ account will cost $4.99 on its own when the service goes live tomorrow, that’s not a bad deal. Apple has said that the music-and-telly bundle will be available for a “limited time”, although it’s not clear how limited that time will be.
Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that Apple was in talks with the labels about bundling Apple Music in with its new video-on-demand service, or the other way round. Such bundling could introduce subscription-based music streaming to a whole new audience, but some at the labels are concerned that it could also cut the amount of money coming into the music industry on a per subscriber basis each month.
So far, other than the student offer, no other bundles involving the various new subscription products Apple is launching have been announced. There’s also no word on quite how the student music-and-telly package will work in terms of how monies are shared out.
Apple has more flexibility over its TV+ service because of how it acquires the rights to that content, so in the short term it could choose to take the hit itself (in essence offering TV+ to music subscribers at no cost) in a bid to take on Netflix.
That fact also means that, for consumers at large, Apple could possibly offer Apple Music and TV+ for, say, thirteen pounds/dollars/euros a month, and just accept that the TV+ service earns two dollars less on that package.
Doing that would be better than giving TV+ away for free, though even with that arrangement, if such a bundle proved popular, Apple could well seek to persuade music to share the burden of offering the discount down the line.
