3 Ways Apple Transformed How Content Is Made and Marketed, According to Eddy Cue

If there’s a single executive responsible for Apple’s growing influence in the entertainment world, it’s Eddy Cue, SVP of services and health. And it’s a big reason why Cue was named Entertainment Person of the Year at the 2026 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Of course, Cue’s impact on Apple extends beyond entertainment and into its growing services portfolio, which includes Apple Health, Apple Pay, and iCloud. While its hardware business has been volatile, services has surged. Consider how Apple’s total revenue since 2021 grew around 14%, while services revenue surged 60%, from $68 billion to around $109 billion. In that time, services went from 19% of total revenue to 26%. But Apple’s services portfolio began with entertainment back in 2003, when Cue launched the iTunes Store. And that entertainment portfolio has only expanded, as Apple has unleashed a string of successive TV and film hits, including Bad Monkey, Ted Lasso, Cape Fear, Severance, and The Studio. Through all of these efforts, Apple Studios has acquired a rare EGOT: winner of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. Cue spoke with Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer today at Cannes Lions. Apple started a film and TV production studio from nothing It was an intentional decision to start Apple Studios in 2019 with an empty slate. It was also an odd decision, as Cue recalled others telling him it would be impossible to start a production studio without licensing content—but Cue said onstage that it would have felt more odd to put Apple’s name on something that Apple didn’t actually create. “So we said, ‘We’re going to start with nothing,’” he recalled. Everyone else, he said, was chasing quantity of content over quality. “We’ve always been about trying to be the best, not the most.” In the beginning, Apple had no knowledge of how to make TV shows and movies. It took two years from the studio’s initial conception to find the right people to head it: Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht. The next major hurdle was creating entertainment that would be a hit, and he got it in November 2019 with The Morning Show. Even that was a gamble. Cue said he asked for a meeting with stars Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, neither of whom he knew. There were other studios in the running, and Apple came at them with no track record of success. “I asked them whether they thought they were going to make one of the best shows ever in television,” Cue recalled, “and they said yes, and I said, ‘Well, then so do I. We don't have any shows, so we believe 100% in what you're doing, and we're going to launch our service on that.’" Transforming how content is produced and delivered Cue worked with star producer Jerry Bruckheimer on F1, who quickly saw that Apple was using technology in ways conventional studios do not. For instance, it was impossible to put a heavy movie camera on top of an actual F1 car because the weight is very carefully calibrated. So Apple used the camera that exists in its smartphone to film scenes from the car’s vantage point. “When you’re watching the movie, you’re seeing the technology from Apple that makes the movie even more exciting,” Bruckheimer said. It impacted Apple’s Formula 1 broadcasts as well, by putting cameras in places where they couldn’t previously be mounted. “You’re able to bring a perspective to people that they’ve never seen, like we did with the movie,” Cue said. Rethinking how content is marketed Apple also was highly experimental when marketing the technology, for instance using haptic feedback to promote F1. Cue recalled an employee coming up with an idea of leveraging the active feedback that was normally used for accessibility, and bringing it to the F1 trailer. “As you watched the trailer, you could see the car as it was moving and feel it in your hands,” Cue said. The tech used for production also fed back into the actual devices as well. The software built for the movie production to enhance stability ended up in the next version of iOS. “This whole thing came together in ways we couldn’t have even thought about when we got started,” Cue said. Bruckheimer said that working with Apple exposed him to ideas he’d never seen studios do: “They surround you with people who make you look better.” Hiring the right people For Cue and Bruckheimer, the common denominator is that Apple hired the right people to make its production studio a success, from waiting to find and hire Van Amburg and Erlicht, to working with the right talent. “The most important thing is the people you hire, and the people you work with,” Cue said. “They will make you look a lot better than you really are, or a lot worse than you really are.”

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