Apple event - As it happened: Steven Spielberg among celebrities launching TV streaming, new credit card and magazine subscription services
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Your support makes all the difference.Apple has launched a whole host of new services, intended to make more money from the people who have already bought its products.
In what was hailed as one of the most significant Apple events in years, the company did not reveal new products or software but instead a range of premium services. Together, they represent new ways to pay for news subscriptions, TV and games – as well as a new way to pay for anything, with a brand new titanium credit card.
The highlight of the new announcements was Apple TV+, a new streaming service built to compete with offerings like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. During the event, it invited many of the world's biggest stars and directors on stage to talk about the new shows, on which Apple is thought to have spent billions of dollars.
But it said it would bring a similar, paid-for and ad-free subscription service, for news and for games. All will allow people to pay a monthly fee for unlimited access to that content.
Apple tried to link the various announcements together through references to its corporate principles: stressing a focus on privacy, quality, and the ways that the various products are built to work with the company's hardware and software.
But the different announcements were also linked together in the fact that few details were announced about any of them. Apple only revealed the cost and release date of one of the new products, and gave little information about how many of them will work.
Please allow a moment for the live blog to load
Press and analysts are making their way into the strange, intricately designed theatre.
↵Overwhelming report suggest that it's cold outside. It's 13-degrees C, according to Apple's own Weather app.
For all this talk about Apple's plans for TV, there hasn't actually been much discussion of the two things already called "Apple TV"*.
1) Its little Apple TV box. There've not been any substantial rumours about whether the puck will be getting an update, though it probably doesn't actually need to in order to use any of this new stuff. Most likely it will just arrive as an app. And besides, the box has become a lot less important recently – Apple in the last couple of months has allowed different TV manufacturers access to its software, suggesting that it's more interested in getting its videos onto whatever TVs can watch them than selling the boxes to do so. But perhaps it will bring out a surprise hardware announcement, of something cheaper but still smart, like the Fire TV stick?
2) The app that's also called "Apple TV". (This has been extra forgotten, but it's definitely how Apple refers to it: it even has its own active Twitter feed, which uses the branding.) It already does a lot of what people talk about this new thing doing, by grouping together video content from different providers into one handy app. There's still very limited support for this among the providers, and you can't easily sign up inside of there. I think it's likely this app will either be killed off or entirely renovated as part of the announcement today.
* I don't think this new thing will be called Apple TV. I think the most likely option is Apple Video, but have no idea, and I don't think anyone outside of Apple probably does either, as is usually the case with marketing stuff.
The live stream is now live, and clickable. It's still not actually showing anything, but it means you can get it started and everything will show up when it happens.
As a reminder, here's the link.
Apple appears to be suggesting the whole thing will take as long as two hours. Get comfy.
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