Apple is considering the creation of a subscription option that would integrate its news, digital magazine, music and video streaming services into a single package.

Offering customers a bundled package could enable Apple to gain ground on Amazon. Currently, Amazon dominates the scene with a staggering 100 million people subscribed to its Prime service – which allows customers to access faster shipping, music streaming and video streaming for a monthly or annual fee.

Compacting Services

Apple already provides a myriad of services and products globally, however, by following a Prime-style service there is huge potential for it to absorb new and existing customers deeper into its product ecosystem. The tech giant already sells smartphones, laptops, tablets, TV set-top boxes and smart speaker products.

This appears to be the logical option moving forward as not only would it enable Apple to compete in this market with Amazon, it would also reduce its reliance on hardware sales.

Tough Competition

Apple faces unprecedented competition in a number of market areas and rival companies don’t look to be slowing down. It has already made great strides into music streaming services with Apple Music and views itself as a direct competitor to Spotify.

It also has to contend with Tidal – the music streaming platform founded by musician Jay Z – as well as now facing the task of competing with Google after it announced its $11.99/month premium services for Youtube.

With 40 million subscribers worldwide, Apple already has a massive presence in the streaming services industry. However, the company has plans to invest a further $1 billion to begin developing and producing video content from 2018 onward. Oprah Winfrey, M Night Shyamalan and Kristen Wiig are all on-board so far in this process and the company signalled its intent last year when it hired Jamie Erlicht and Zack van Amburg from Sony Pictures.

This all appears very grandiose and large sums of money are floating around, however, when compared to competitors it becomes clear that Apple has a difficult task ahead of it.

Netflix has a budget of over $8 billion at its disposal, while Amazon can draw upon $5 billion in funds. As far as initial investment goes, however, this is a significant moment for a company that has traditionally avoided buying content; choosing instead to focus on partnership deals in this field.

Mounting Pressure

Apple isn’t the only company currently exploring the idea of bundle packages. Speculation has been mounting recently that Spotify will push into video content. This speculation appears to be accurate after last weeks announcement that the company hired Dawn Ostroff, who has spent the last seven years leading video operations for Conde Nast Entertainment.