Apple TV+ Is Better Than Netflix

Kind of… There’s a bit more to it, but hear me out…

While half the bored population of planet Earth is consumed by the tragic news of Netflix losing hundreds of thousands of subscribers virtually overnight for the first time in over a decade, the rest of the world cares very little or at all about this so-called seismic event in the media streaming industry.

You might have guessed, but you’d be guessing wrong, that I’m going to go on a rant about Netflix. It’s topical, I may as well, right? Well, I won’t. I’ll also try my best not to over-inflate the value of Apple TV+, but that’s going to be a bit more difficult because some benefits of Apple’s streaming service are hard to ignore. The fact of the matter is, regardless of who is winning or losing subscribers in this game, I feel, quite strongly, that Apple and Apple TV+ is winning in a category that Netflix never thought existed. Let me elaborate.

None of Apple’s products are for every customer, and that includes Apple TV+.

As an avid Netflixer myself — with occasional hiatuses of a year or two — I have seen the company grow, and I have seen their offering go from pathetic, to intriguing, from nothing to watch to too much to watch. Going from a collection of movies that looked like the shelves of a charity shop in digital format to exclusives and originals turned Netflix into an offering that tried to get every customer through the door. Even today, browsing through it, I always get the impression I would normally get walking into those all-you-can-eat buffets. Smells a bit funky, but it’s warm inside, the drinks are refillable and so are the plates. The variety is so wide that if you can’t find something to your liking there, then you may as well go home, and really, can you be picky when you get to eat for 2.5 hours non-stop for just 20 bucks?

The Netflix model is both revolutionary and entirely not. An all-you-can-watch buffet where you can’t complain because you found something you liked after all.

And you have got to hand it to them. It’s not a terrible business model. It works with food, so one may as well try to do the same with digital content like movies and series. Viewer trends also prove this theory. Most people will watch one or two series every quarter. It’s what keeps them subscribed. The rest of their watch-time comes from not wanting to subscribe to yet another streaming service to stay selective, so they fill in the gap with whatever else there is on Netflix, even if it’s of questionable quality or as old as yer granny’s knickers.

Don’t get me wrong. There are hidden diamonds inside the Netflix library. For instance, I found several Romanian movies that I would otherwise not have access to at all. A couple of great series like The Family and Hometown Cha-cha-cha that I binged like few others on Netflix because all the others were on… you guessed it — Apple TV+.

It almost feels like Apple TV+ has a bit more class overall than all the other streaming services out there.

It’s funny because while it’s premium, and if you ask me, it’s the most premium offering out there, the price-tag is essentially four times lower than Netflix’s. But let’s put aside price for a second and focus on what Apple truly offers here — exclusivity, first. What effectively Apple decided to do so far, is offer their content exclusively on Apple TV+. No partnerships, no buying existing content, everything from scratch. On the surface, it’s a terrible business model. On a much smaller scale, this is precisely what bloggers deal with when they first launch — lack of content. They might have a buffer of a few articles, but that’s it, and it’s really hard to attract users with barely anything in your library.

But what happens when a small collection of content outranks everyone else in quality? People take notice.

When Apple TV+ first launched, I wasn’t overly impressed, and the lack of content was of great concern to me. But, then I started watching. For All Mankind, The Morning Show, Dickinson, Trying, Home, On the Rocks, Greyhound, Home After Dark and I could go on and on.

Apple TV+ content fails to disappoint. It inspires, triggers the imagination. It intrigues in meaningful ways.

And that’s when it dawned on me. Apple didn’t launch its service to be yet another streaming platform. It somehow goes back to that original 1997 Think Different slogan because while everything I watched on Netflix was decent entertainment, every time I spend time watching something on Apple TV+, I feel energised, I feel like I was part of a story, that the world-view was challenged in ways other streaming services’ content didn’t. I get excited every time something new launches on Apple TV+ because I feel like I’ll be exposed to new thinking again. Severance, Invasion, Truth Be Told and many others have opened floodgates of thoughts and creativity in me like Amazon, Disney+ or Netflix, and heck even Curiosity Stream couldn’t.

I don’t know who curate content over at Apple. I heard they have a tough job and the team is an absolute shit-show, but let me raise my hat to them regardless. So far, they managed to provide an absolute, inarguable, incontestable value for money. They managed to pull the same vibe off with digital content as the rest of Apple does with their hardware. Apple yet again manages to create a cult-like following, and a much more powerful one than Adam Newman’s from We Crashed.

It’s almost uncanny how much I can see Steve Jobs in Apple TV+, even after many years of his passing.

Apple TV+ is better than Netflix, it’s better than Amazon Prime, and all the others out there because their content is not about “more content” but “better content”. Content that’s meant to take you places, and consistently so. And man, it really does. For the five bucks, it takes you further than any of the competition. No tiers, no noise and rubbish to rake away to spot the good stuff. It’s only good stuff, in crystal-clear detail, beautifully integrated into the Apple ecosystem.

If Apple TV+ would suddenly cost the same as Netflix’s 4K offering, I’d still choose it over Netflix. It’s more than entertainment, it’s Apple’s artistic expression of its own ethos.

And before you ask me how much Apple paid me for this article, they didn’t. 😃

Attila Vago — Software Engineer improving the world one line of code at a time. Cool nerd since forever, writer of codes and blogs. Web accessibility advocate, Lego fan, vinyl record collector. Loves craft beer!