Apple Services celebrate 2019 as landmark year

January 10, 2020 Off By Naveen Victor

Apple Services raked in a nice profit for Cupertino in 2019. Admittedly, it was a landmark year for Apple due to the launch of various services that include Apple Arcade, Apple TV+, Apple News+ and Apple Card.

These new additions joined the stalwarts, the App Store, Apple Music and iCloud to fill up the company’s coffers. Apparently, between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, customers spent $1.42 billion on the Apple Store, a 16% increase over last year.

Apple Music, formally known as iTunes, has a collection of over 60 million songs to choose from. It’s a direct competitor to Spotify, which is one of the most widely used music streaming service around the world.

Apple TV+, a movie streaming service that was launched late last year, made history as the first streaming platform to receive multiple Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations in its launch year.

As a means to increase the presence of this service, Cupertino will be expanding the reach of its Apple TV app by including it on rival platforms such select:

Samsung smart TVs
Amazon Fire TV
Roku devices
LG smart TVs
Sony smart TVs
VIZIO smart TVs

Some of these devices will receive the app as early as this year and will be granted access to over 30 of its TV channels and direct subscriptions to premium video services. This is a smart move considering that, eventually, Apple TV+ will be the ultimate beneficiary.

The gradual decline of smartphone sales over the past few years has forced Apple to rethink its product strategy. It could no longer rely on the iPhone for sustained growth and as such, has chose to lean heavily towards the services side of the business.