Apple Announces Fitness+
A new fitness experience for everyone, powered by Apple Watch. World-class workouts by the world’s top trainers. New workouts every week. Work out how and where you want.
There are some people who miss the days when Apple only made shiny pieces of metal. I am not in that camp. I have no problem with Apple rolling out new services, as long as they are made with purpose and care. Fitness+ fits the bill. It’s a really nice integration of Apple’s ecosystem to bring something new to home fitness courses. The interaction between the recorded video and the user’s on-screen health metrics is useful and simple for prospective subscribers to understand.
Although we can’t test the app yet, the marketing screenshots are promising. It looks like a well made app, with some signature Apple niceties sprinkled on top. There are some obvious paths for future expansion, such as offering live sessions or audio-only workouts for when you are exercising outside with your Watch and AirPods, which I’m sure Apple will get to in the fullness of time.
Until I can try it out for myself (“by the end of the year”), the only criticism I have is that the service will require a Watch. The Fitness app on iPad and Apple TV won’t let you do anything unless it can sense that a nearby Watch is present. This seems like an unnecessary artificial limitation. It is true that the unique parts of the service do depend on the Watch, but I think it’s stupid that the rest of my (non-Watch bearing) family won’t be allowed to use the Apple TV to follow along with the virtual classes and do some exercise.
When I was watching the presentation live, before the denouement of the Fitness+ section, I was expecting a $4.99 per month price point. Fundamentally, Fitness+ is workout videos with some overlaid metrics. Apple can pump these out with relatively low overheads. So, $5 felt about right, to match the value proposition as Arcade and TV+.
With that expectation in mind, I was taken aback when they said it was $9.99 per month (or $80 a year). Music is $9.99 because you get truly unlimited music and streaming music market is tightly controlled. News+ is $9.99 because Apple has to pay publishers. The content offered by Music and News has a marginal cost, which is not true for TV+ and Arcade. Those services have fixed cost financials; Apple doesn’t pay each time a user consumes games or TV shows, it only has to lay down the upfront cost of commissioning them. Hence, only $5.
Fitness+ is a fixed cost service, but it has higher-rate pricing. From the business side, Apple is going to singing for the hills if they can accrue millions of Fitness+ subscribers. It will easily be their most profitable service per customer. In the scheme of things, producing a set of fitness videos on a weekly basis is relatively inexpensive. Their outlay on a single TV+ show will easily cost more than running the entire the Fitness+ service for years.
That being said, it doesn’t matter how much it costs to make, it’s what the market can bear. At $9.99, Fitness+ is legitimately competitive with other workout plans. I clicked on a handful of fitness apps in the App Store, and Apple’s offering is coming in at the same price or sometimes slightly cheaper. For instance, Peloton’s digital subscription is $13. Fitness+ is not a direct competitor to Peloton’s business, but it plays in the same space.
Moreover, Apple has an ulterior motivation. It’s the bundle. As soon as I saw the Apple One pricing slide, any doubts I had about the chosen pricing were explained away on the spot. By making Fitness+ cost a lot, the Premier bundle looks way more appealing. The Premier bundle boasts a $25 saving on a $29.95 monthly price. Almost half of that discount is enabled by Fitness+ being part of Premier, a service that costs Apple almost all no money. Brilliant.