Business

The Apple TV Plus streaming service continued to make strides on the content front in Apple’s third quarter (ended June 25), Apple CEO Tim Cook said July 28, on an earnings call.

However, the company continued to remain silent on how many subscribers its over-the-top (OTT) service now has.

Apple CFO Luca Maestri said only that the company now has “more than 860 million paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, which is up more than 160 million during the last 12 months alone.” Overall paid Apple subscriptions “showed very strong growth,” he noted.

The company “saw increased customer engagement with our services during the quarter” as “transacting accounts, paid accounts and accounts with paid subscriptions all grew double digits year over year,” Maestri told analysts.

“We continue to improve the breadth and the quality of our current services offerings, from a constant flow of new content on Apple TV Plus and Apple Arcade to great new features we recently announced for iCloud and Apple Music, which we believe our customers will love.

“Customers continue to engage enthusiastically with our content across news, fitness, music, gaming, and more,” Cook told analysts on the call.

Q3 services revenue rose to $19.6 billion, a June quarter record that was 12% higher than the $17.5 billion it reported last year, “in line with our expectations,” Cook said. Total Apple revenue inched up 2% from a year ago to a record $83 billion.

Apple was “proud of how Apple TV Plus productions like Severance and Black Bird have captured the popular imagination, and we’re looking forward to more exceptional content developed by extraordinary creators throughout the year,” Cook said.

In the two and a half years since Apple TV Plus launched, it has “earned 250 wins and over 1,100 award nominations and counting,” he noted. “Just this month, we learned that Apple TV Plus earned 52 Emmy Award nominations across 13 titles,” he said.

On the company’s prior earnings call, Cook mentioned the company’s pact with Major League Baseball to exclusively air Friday Night Baseball games on Apple TV Plus, he noted. Last month, Apple announced a 10-year deal to present Major League Soccer matches globally, he added.

Apple’s Q3 revenue performance was “better than we expected despite supply constraints, strong foreign exchange headwinds, and the impact of our business in Russia,” Cook said. Apple, like several other manufacturers, pulled its products out of Russia to protest the invasion of Ukraine.

Supply constraints on Apple’s latest iPhones, iPads and Mac computers were, meanwhile, “less than we anticipated at the beginning of the quarter, coming in slightly below the range we discussed during our last call,” he said.

Meanwhile, “customers and developers have been especially excited about the new features we’re bringing to iPad” with the latest operating system update, iPadOS 16, he told analysts.

That update was one of the announcements Apple made at its recent Worldwide Developers Conference in June, he said, noting the company “shared a range of new features that give customers more control of their experience than ever before.” That includes the ability to edit or delete sent messages, a new way of organizing apps on iPads and Macs, and a customizable lock screen on iPhones.

IOS 16, iPadOS 16, MacOS Ventura and watchOS 9 are all currently in public beta, Cook pointed out.