Ahead of Sunday’s Oscars ceremony, Apple TV Plus’s CODA (pictured) and Netflix’s The Power of the Dog were considered the front-runners for best picture.
Apple
Apple’s film CODA won the Oscar for best picture on Sunday, beating out powerhouse Netflix to become the first streaming service to take Hollywood’s most coveted film award. Netflix was also nominated in the category for its film The Power of the Dog, and the two streaming services were seen as the frontrunners in the category going into Sunday’s awards ceremony.
Apple’s coup is sure to give the fledgling streaming service a boost in potential subscribers, even as competition between Apple TV Plus, Netflix, and their rivals grows fiercer than ever. Over the past three years, several companies have poured billions of dollars into launching new services in hopes of taking on Netflix to shape the future of television.
For people like you, that means a jumble of services to sort through and pay for while figuring out where to watch movies and shows online. Apple’s Oscar win on Sunday will raise its profile among a subset of potential subscribers; it can lure a few defected members back into the herd; and it’s sure to make Apple TV Plus a more attractive home for top talent.
See also: Oscars 2022: The full list of winners
But being the first to receive an elusive award isn’t necessarily a transformative event for streaming services.
Hulu, for example, beat Netflix to win the Best Drama Emmy in 2017, but has continued to live in the shadow of Netflix’s dominance ever since: Netflix has more than 221 million subscribers worldwide, compared to Hulu’s 45 million.
And Apple TV Plus might be smaller. The company has never disclosed how many people are using Apple TV Plus, but The Information reported last summer that Apple TV Plus had about 40 million members — and all while many were taking advantage of Apple’s generous free trials. One analyst estimated that 62% of Apple TV Plus accounts watched the service for free with some type of advertising. Since then, Apple has discontinued many of those free advertising subscriptions, which another researcher says have pushed Apple TV Plus to the highest rate of fleeing subscribers in the past year.
And Apple, less than three years old, is still finding its place in the noisy competitive arena of today’s streaming services. With a multibillion-dollar budget to onboard some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Apple TV Plus took an unconventional path: investing in prestigious, big-budget, star-heavy originals and basically nothing else. Without any back catalog to dive into, Apple TV Plus only had nine titles to watch at launch. In the two and a half years since then, it has accumulated more than 100 titles.
For comparison: Netflix releases more than 100 titles in February, March and April alone.
Netflix is the undisputed king of streaming, achieved through a mix of first-mover advantage, aggressive spending and the ability to disrupt long-held norms. However, the latter has proven to be a liability when it comes to chasing Hollywood’s most sacred awards.
The service has been aiming for an Oscar for best picture for years. Since Netflix began creating its own programming a decade ago, it received its first Oscar nomination for a documentary in 2014 and won its first Oscar for a documentary in 2017. Last year, Netflix was the top-grossing studio on Oscar night, taking home seven statues, but the Best Picture award remained out of reach.
Streaming movies had an easier run at the Oscars this year and last. As the COVID-19 pandemic has upended film releases around the world, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hosts the Oscars, has relaxed its eligibility rules to make it easier to nominate streaming-only releases.
The unprecedented nature of movie releases during the pandemic also blurred the lines of what a streaming movie is. Typically, films from traditional studios follow rigid release windows that take films exclusively to theaters for six to nine months. During the pandemic, that went out the window across the board. It made Oscar movies more accessible than ever to watch from home in the past two years, but it also messed up what should be considered a streaming movie.
But Apple’s big Oscar win certainly confirms that its pursuit of prestigious programming is at least paying off, with prestigious accolades to match.
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