Good to hear some perspective on this. I think this story shows an interesting trend to remove the middleman.
After Apple and all the other tech giants used the web to replace traditional distribution of content, now they are being to get a bit of their own medicine.
Nice to see those tech giants fighting each other.
It’s not really the middleman per se, but apples cut for being the middle man is quite high, especially for a recurring subscription.
One thing to take a 30% cut on the initial sale, when you provide the store and the order processing and what not, but a completely different story to take 30% for a subscription... though after one year it drops to 15% cut, that’s still too high. At that point you are literally nothing more than a credit card processor and provide confirmation the subscription is valid...
It means that NetFlix is doing some serious (and temporary) budget cutting, in its largest and most profitable single market. They must know how many customers actually stream content on phones, and how much content, and Google Play and iTunes drew the short straw. It probably won't last, but it won't go back to the old rates, either.