Apple Looking to Finance Movies With Oscar-Winning Potential to Boost Its Streaming Service: Report

Apple, already one of the highest-valued and most profitable companies in the world, owes much of its success to its booming hardware business. However, the company has for long now indicated that it sees services as the path forward. These services include Apple TV+, which was announced earlier this year to rival Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. According to a new report, Apple is looking to boost the content catalogue of this new streaming service by financing movies with Oscar-winning potential.

A report by the New York Post suggests that Apple is in talks with various directors and film talent to fund movies that have Oscar-winning potential. The Academy Awards, popularly known as the Oscars, are considered the most prestigious awards for cinema, and attract a lot of attention all over the world. By bankrolling films that could potentially win an Oscar, Apple would naturally gain exclusive streaming rights for those films.

According to the report, Apple is searching for six small-budget films that can be made with a budget of $5 million to $30 million per project.

This could be used to boost the content library of its upcoming streaming service - Apple TV+ - which is set to be launched later this year. Having exclusive access to films deemed to be the best of the year would naturally be a huge boost for the streaming service. The strategy is similar to that of Netflix, which won big at the 2019 Academy Awards with Roma.

Streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have gained paying users by offering a wide variety of original content, as well as quality content for which the services have exclusive streaming rights. These deals have helped keep users on the platforms, and Apple will look to follow a similar strategy. While the Cupertino-based company has already announced a bunch of original content timed around its launch, deals such as these show that Apple is looking ahead as well.