Top Engineer from Netflix Joins Apple to Bolster Apple TV+

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Apple has made an interesting new hire for the team behind its Apple TV+ subscription service, revealing a bit about the company’s plans to invest and improve on the service behind the scenes, and not merely keep pouring all of its money into content.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple has managed to woo a top engineer, Ruslan Meshenberg, away from Netflix. One of the key people responsible for Netflix’s success in being able to deliver its content to the masses, Meshenberg helped to create the infrastructure that created a “speedier, more consistent service for viewers,” the Journal notes.

Sources familiar with the hire and Meshenberg’s social media accounts told the Journal that he joined Apple’s internet-service organization this week, where he will undoubtedly use his talents to improve Apple’s streaming service to ensure that it can continue to scale as the company prepares to launch a whole slew of new shows this year.

Apple doesn’t have a particularly stellar track record when it comes to scaling its online services, so if it expects Apple TV+ to support the hundreds of millions of subscribers that it hopes to gain, it knows it’s going to need to bring some more serious talent on board to handle that side of things.

Growing Apple TV+

While Apple TV+ hasn’t suffered any major infrastructure problems just yet — for most people the streaming aspect is working well despite sporadic reports of a few problems here and there — it’s fair to say that the limited amount of content that’s available right now means there’s not much demand being put on Apple’s nascent streaming service. However, it’s only a matter of time before that changes as Apple rolls out more and more content.

To put it in perspective, right now Apple TV+ hosts barely a dozen shows and two or three movies, adding up to less than 100 hours of actual content, and that’s even factoring in announced but not-yet-released shows like Mythic Quest. Netflix, on the other hand, has over 125 million hours of content in its library, and reportedly delivers over a billion hours of that programming every week to more than 50 countries — and Meshenberg was the key engineer behind the infrastructure at Netflix that made it all possible.

That said, the Apple TV+ service hasn’t been without its technical struggles — it’s just that streaming performance hasn’t been one of them yet. The Apple TV app on the company’s own set-top boxes suffers from a number of design problems, making it complicated for users to find Apple TV+ content, along with sporadic issues synchronizing the watched and in-progress status of shows. It’s unclear whether this is related to infrastructure or a function of the design of the app itself, but it’s definitely another area that Apple needs to address if it hopes to convince more users to actually start paying for the streaming service.

To be fair, Netflix had a slow and steady growth curve at the dawn of the era of streaming services that allowed it to scale more gradually, addressing many of the challenges before they became serious problems. With the popularity of modern streaming services, Apple has been fortunate that its initial slate of content is so small as to put little demand on its service. By contrast, when Disney+ launched two weeks after Apple TV+ — in only three countries — it racked up 10 million subscribers the very first day and found that it couldn’t keep up with the sudden demand, and it took several days before the service’s performance even began to improve.

During Apple’s earnings call earlier this week, CEO Tim Cook noted that the success of Apple TV+ will ultimately be judged by how many subscribers the company is able to attract to the service, and Apple has been aggressive with its pricing in order to quickly gain subscribers, undercutting Disney+ and offering it free for a year to new hardware customers. However, Apple hasn’t disclosed what its current subscriber numbers are, nor how many of them are simply along for the free ride and may or may not convert into paying customers this fall. Either way, Apple is going to have to put a lot of effort into both its content and its infrastructure if it expects Apple TV+ to succeed.

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