Tim Cook, CEO of Apple Inc., speaks during the Apple Developers World Conference (WWDC) in San Jose, California, USA, on Monday, June 5, 2017.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | fake pictures
In the summer of 2017, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that Amazon’s Prime Video service would launch on the Apple TV set-top box, after a long and notable absence.
An email released by the House Antimonopoly Subcommittee on Wednesday shed new light on the negotiations that led to that announcement. It shows that an Apple executive offered Amazon a 15% fee on subscriptions that were registered through the app, which is less than Apple’s usual 30% fee for most in-app purchases.
The email suggests that big players may trade better trade terms on Apple’s App Store, contradicting Apple’s public stance that all apps are treated the same on their platform. “We apply the rules to all developers uniformly,” Cook testified Wednesday.
Software manufacturers must use Apple’s payment mechanism for any digital purchase within an iPhone application. Apple generally takes 30% of the initial purchase price, including 30% of the first year of subscription services that customers purchase through the app, then drops the fee to 15% in the second year of a subscription. The 30% fee is a central part of Spotify’s antitrust complaint to EU regulators.
In May 2016, Bezos told an interviewer that Amazon refused to sell devices such as Apple TV or Google Chromecast on Amazon.com because he was unable to agree on terms to place Amazon Prime Video on those devices.
“When we sell those devices, we want our player, our Prime Video player, to be on the device, and we want it to be on the device with acceptable business terms,” he said. “You can always put the player on the device. The question is, can you put it there with acceptable business terms?”
Sometime later in the year, Bezos met with Apple’s senior vice president Eddy Cue and discussed business terms for this and other matters, according to the document released Wednesday.
“Jeff, I really enjoyed our time together,” he sent an email to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in November 2016.
“Here are the details of what we discussed in Prime Video – Amazon Prime Video app on iOS and Apple TV – 15% revenue share for customers who sign up using the app (use our payment); no share in revenue for customers who have already signed up. ”
Additionally, Cue said that if Amazon could sell services like Showtime on its app, Apple would only take 15% if the customer originally signed up through Apple.
It is unclear if the companies ended up accepting the terms in the email. Although the Amazon Prime Video app appeared on Apple TV only in 2017, a version of the Amazon video app was available on iOS since 2012, and the terms were not known before or after the Cue to Bezos email.
Representatives for Apple and Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
Apple’s deal with Amazon was made public earlier this year when users discovered that the Amazon Prime Video iPhone app began allowing users to purchase digital content (movies and TV shows) within the app using a video card. credit registered with Amazon. Apple said at the time that it was part of an “established program” for “premium subscription video entertainment providers.”
Chamber antitrust subcommittee
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