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Jon Stewart’s Apple TV Plus show ends, reportedly over coverage of AI and China (www.theverge.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/6745228

TLDR: Apple wants to keep china happy, Stewart was going after china in some way, Apple said don’t, Stewart walked, the show is dead.

Not surprising at all, but sad and shitty and definitely reduces my loyalty to the platform. Hosting Stewart seemed like a real power play from Apple, where conflict like this was inevitable, but they were basically saying, yes we know, but we believe in things and, as a big company with deep pockets that can therefore take risks, to prove it we’re hosting this show.

Changing their minds like this is worse than ever hosting the show in the first place as it shows they probably don’t know what they’re doing or believe in at all, like any big company, and just going for what seems cool, and undermining the very idea of a company like Apple running a streaming platform. I wonder if the Morning Show/Wars people are paying close attention.

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[–] 24 points 2 years ago (5 children)

I’m seeing a lot of anonymous quotes and assumptions but not a lot of verifiable facts. Sure, creative differences may have existed, but did any meaningful number of people watch the show? Even in online communities dedicated to Apple TV specifically I can’t recall seeing anything other than perfunctory mentions. Nobody ever actually talked about this show. I feel like the show was probably already on thin ice with a questionable ROI, and some likely not terribly sensational disagreement pushed it over the edge. Makes more sense than Apple caring what he says about AI, since they’ve pointedly avoided the embarrassing hype train, and clearly aren’t going to engage in the sort of exploitative “all of your documents are now our training corpus” nonsense that he’s likely to actually criticize.

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  • [–] [S] 14 points 2 years ago

    I've seen plenty of talk about the show and some of the interviews being widely celebrated. Doesn't mean that there was good ROI, but I'd also wager that plenty of people watch apple TV+ stuff without being vocal about it that much just because so many people have apple stuff and just watch whatever is "good".

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago*

    John "walking" means he quit the show, not that he was let go.

    Viewership on Apple TV will never be high, as it is a low-performing streaming service in general. It's a bad idea to lose flagship content on a struggling streaming service.

    This is a far more significant loss for Apple than it is for John Stewart.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Interesting how you skip over the China part entirely while you cook up an imagined narrative to hand wave away the show based on your personal feelings that has nothing to do with Jon walking.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    The article is based on vague claims from anonymous sources. If the claims about AI don’t make sense to begin with (and they don’t because Apple isn’t involved in any of the stuff that he might reasonably criticize), that doesn’t make me think they knew what they were talking about regarding China either. If the source is disreputable, who cares what they said? If you make two claims and one doesn’t pass the smell test, I’m not going to waste time entertaining what really happened regarding the second claim.

    Let me put it another way: there are too many real, verifiable outrageous things going on in the world for me to get my pitchfork out for something as weak on sourcing and details as this. Business agreements end for lots of reasons, and often a combination. People often have an axe to grind, especially if they were somehow involved in a deal that went south. This isn’t nearly enough for me to make any judgment.

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