How The March 2019 Apple Event Should Impact Podcasts For Years To Come

It's April 25, 2019 and Apple just had a big event that is going to impact podcasting for a long time. Okay, Paul, hyperbole, what do you mean it's going to impact podcasting for a long time? What does this have to do with podcasting? Podcasting was barely announced at the event. Well, the fact matter, yes, it was barely announced. I think I saw it on screen once. There was this concept brought out that we're going to bring things directly to you whenever and wherever you are. And, and remember, Apple has just gotten to a point in their organization where they realize the power of doing this. Yet we have realized the power of doing this for a long time. Apple has been working desperately to get their stuff on other devices, Roku devices and Fire TVs and Samsung Smart TVs, but we've been doing this for a very long time. See, Apple starts this event with the announcement that their future is world class services. Yet you, the podcaster, have been producing world class services for quite some time. Let's go over the event. So, news plus the ability for Apple to bring a enhanced news system, not just this ad enhanced garbage that is the news app, but the ability to pay 10 bucks a month to get regular magazines, the New York Times, the LA Times, that type of thing. Interesting. No extra for family sharing. I will probably jump over that. I'm sure my wife will be really interested in that. And, and I think that is something to think about. We're going to go to Apple for not just our games and not just our music and not just our videos, but our news as well. I think this is going to make a lot of podcasters very excited. The other thing that happened was the whole idea of this Apple card. Or another thing that happened was the idea of the Apple card. Apple is coming into the world of again looking at services as a product that they want to offer. It's going to make them more money in the end than than hardware, software, iPhones, iPads, that kind of stuff. They also introduced an arcade which is a monthly service to do video games. We'll see what happens there. I think the Google offering is very interesting. They offered Apple TV plus a service that will bring and then they brought back a whole bunch of Hollywood types chatting about their shows and how all these things are going to be impactful. It was funny, they started the whole thing with how great the storytellers were and I thought maybe they were going to podcasting or something like that. But Apple has focused entirely on the world class services. We need to examine this deeper. Easy to use, attention to detail, private, secure, expert curation, personalized and family sharing. These are the tenants that Apple brought out after every single one of the things that they launched. Easy to use podcasting, incredibly easy to use. Subscribe and it comes to you, it comes spam free, it comes on the platform, your device. Easy attention to detail. The podcaster can go as fine, granulated, detailed as they want to, or they can skip over things and go really, really quickly. Private and secure. Although there are some organizations trying to make podcasting less private and less secure, right now is extremely private and secure, personalized. Here's one of the great things we podcast consumers and I'm definitely a podcast consumer and hopefully you are as well. We grab only what we want and we don't have other stuff thrown at us. YouTube and this is important. YouTube, 70%, 7 0% of all their videos come from somebody watches one video and YouTube then pushes another video to them that is personalized to the benefit of making YouTube more money. Because remember, the more videos you watch at YouTube, the more ads, the more money they make. But the fact of the matter is our shows, our playlist, our subscription list are extremely personalized because we only get what we want. We don't have anything else shoved in our face. And, and then family sharing is just more a sales aspect inside of Apple. But obviously families can share our podcast as well. Everything that Apple is talking about in their services is something that we've been doing a long time. So let's go right to the take homes and some of the things that we need to think about when it comes to this event. Apple is moving to services because one reason there is more money in services than there is in product. Apple is moving to services because there is more money in services than in product. This is incredibly important. This is the future of computing, of entertainment, of content. It's not the TV set that brings us the show that the money is on. It is the show that the money is on. This is why Apple, you know, pretty much killed the HomePod today, pretty much killed the Apple TV today, pretty much killed some of their hardware devices because they know that the service getting that thing on, right? Roku getting that thing on fire. TV getting that thing on Samsung. Think about this. Samsung, their big competitor in the phone space is going to come with the Apple TV app. Why are they doing this? Because there's more money in services than there is in product. So we need to take the next logical jump in. There is that Apple services are Greater than Apple products. Say this again. Apple services are greater than Apple products. Let's start with the Apple card. The card has nothing to do with computers. You can have an Apple card. Yeah, it integrates with the iPhone and that's a nice way to do it. But they give you a physical card as well. You don't have to use the iPhone to make this thing work. I guess you do, but, you know, they'll probably have a website for it. The fact of the matter is they've launched this thing that is completely independent of the computing world. This is huge. Apple services are greater than Apple products. We hear rumors of Apple getting into the car space. Apple services, you know, who knows? Maybe that one's a product. I don't know. Interesting thought there. That will be a product, but maybe it's the system that runs it. Maybe Apple builds the thing that Toyota drops in their system. I don't know. We'll see. Realize that Apple TV plus the service is going to be greater than Apple tv, the product. They're putting Apple TV now in other devices, in other places. They're not going to make any more money from that. They're going to make money from the services that are delivered by Apple tv. So Apple TV plus is greater than Apple tv. We've been chatting about this for weeks, but Apple's putting Apple music everywhere. They're putting Apple on the A, L, E, X, A. I'd say her name, but as you know, there's one in the room. Whenever I say her name during a podcast episode, she speaks up. Think about this. The HomePod's sole purpose was to play music for us. But now that I can get it on the Alexa, what's next? Possibly the Google Home, possibly other devices. Will we see it on the Fire TV platform? And I mean, if they're putting Apple TV on there, why wouldn't they put Apple music on their things to think about? So music is bigger for them than the hardware that delivers the music. Apple TV plus is bigger for them than the TVs that actually deliver it. Music, television, podcasts. Now, here's the thing. You have to be logical. You have to think about this. They have TV plus, which is the paid TV service. They have Arcade, which is the paid arcade service. They have News plus, which is the paid service. If they were to launch Podcast plus right now, that would be absolutely ridiculous at this point. There are some who are trying to do the Netflix of podcasting. And I appreciate Apple tremendously for not trying to push this. This is not a good idea at this point. I don't know if it'll ever be a good idea at this point. But. But I'll tell you this. The reason we're jumping to Apple News to deliver our news, the reason we're jumping to Apple to deliver our money through the card or arcade, to deliver our games or TV plus to deliver our TV is because we trust Apple to do it. And podcasting, we're going to piggyback on that, but we're going to piggyback on every other system as well. All those devices that Apple puts their music on, our podcast is on. All those TV that Apple puts their system on, our video podcast is on. See? Good stuff. We got to think about it now. Podcasts paid would be ridiculous at this point, but that doesn't mean that it does not become part of the bundling. If you look at the information, if you look at the most recent Infinite Dial Report, podcasts are getting more and more popular. It's being integrated into things. When they showed at the beginning of the presentation the apps that use the services, they included podcast in that even though the service isn't necessarily even their service, it's our service. Yeah, it's their directory and, and it's their reviews and it's their always maligned charting, but it's our service that they're delivering through their app. So something to think about. Now, a couple of bigger things. Getting an app for your podcast is not going to get you into the Apple TV platform. I've chatted about apps for a while. What that means getting an app will get you on Apple TV hardware, but getting an app for your show will not get you on the larger Apple TV infrastructure. What this does to your strategy, what this does to what you are doing, you need to think out and you need to go through. Finally, the last thing you need to think about is simply the idea. If Apple is going to the future of service, you should think about your podcast as a service. And if you think about your podcast as a service, you're going to think about your podcast as being bigger than the hardware that it's being consumed on. I've been saying this for a long time, but if you think about the opportunity, Apple seizing the opportunity, be very interested to see what happens to the stock market, what happens to their stock as a result of this. Apple seizing the future of services because they realize it's bigger than anything else. My question is, are you, the podcaster, going to do the same? Services is bigger than platforms. Your content is bigger than anything that it's delivered on. Will you realize that? Will you take the next step? I certainly hope so. Stay subscribed to the podcast report as we go deeper and deeper into this one. Thanks. Congrats, Apple. Great show. Bye.