Is Apple TV the New HBO? (Cordkillers #606)

Is Apple TV becoming the new HBO? Janko Roettgers at The Verge makes the case, and we dig into what that actually means: prestige hits like Severance, Pachinko, Silo, and Ted Lasso, low overall rankings on Nielsen’s The Gauge, and a service whose heavy viewers cluster around a few major scripted shows instead of spreading across a giant library. But if HBO itself struggled to be “the HBO of streaming” once Max and Discovery content muddied the brand, can Apple TV pull it off? Apple’s business model is different: it makes money from devices, services, and aggregation, and Apple TV still doesn’t have an ad-supported tier. Maybe that changes the math. Plus: Amazon MGM drops the Sam Altman/OpenAI movie Artificial, Peacock orders Dungeon Crawler Carl, Shrek 5 teases “one year,” Apple TV makes the Austrian Grand Prix free to watch, Instagram pushes toward TV-style viewing, KPop Demon Hunters keeps dominating Netflix, Fox Creator Studios expands its roster, and Google invests in A24 to explore AI filmmaking tools. Support Cordkillers on Patreon: patreon dot com slash cordkillers Got something we should be on the lookout for? Email [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])