Apple is a services company, too, and Eddy Cue’s vision is very different from Google’s

Apple has always been known as a hardware company, and it still is, but services are more important to its strategy and bottom line than ever before. That point was driven home not just by the most recent Apple earnings report—in which CEO Tim Cook identified services as a division ripe for a doubling of revenue by 2020—but also by a talk by Apple SVP Eddy Cue at SXSW this week.

Interviewed by CNN’s Dylan Byers, Cue talked about Apple News, the tensions between open and closed platforms, and the company’s TV and video strategy. Many of the statements he made seemed carefully crafted to distinguish Apple from other tech giants that have been the subjects of criticism in recent months.

Cue heads Apple’s software and services efforts, and he took the stage in Austin moments after Apple announced it would acquire Texture, a magazine distribution app that has been repeatedly called the “Netflix of magazines” by numerous press outlets.

Texture only has a few hundred thousand subscribers at last report. But Apple Music—born out of the Beats acquisition and iTunes—has reached 38 million subscribers, with two million added just last month. Cue also said that eight million people are currently participating in the three-month free trial Apple offers of the service. Chief competitor Spotify had 70 million as of January.

Apple’s services are growing, but what does the company have planned? Cue offered some insights.

Doing TV like Pixar does movies

With regard to the TV strategy, Cue said, “we’re not after quantity; we’re after quality,” as Apple’s team of 40 or so, led by former Sony execs, works to strategically spend more than $1 billion on original programming. Cue compared the company’s approach to that of Pixar (another company with close ties to Steve Jobs).

Meanwhile, Netflix is employing a strategy that increasingly looks like throwing everything it can grab at the wall of user taste and seeing what sticks—though some of what sticks is quite good. Netflix is reportedly spending as great as six times as much on original content as what Apple plans to spend in 2018.

We still don’t know exactly where Apple’s TV efforts will fit into its services, though. Will they be offered as part of Apple Music or another service altogether? If the former, will Apple Music be rebranded? Cue didn’t speak about any of that. However, he did say that Apple has no plans to buy either Netflix or Disney, specifying that the company prefers to focus on acquisitions of companies, products, and technologies that will be key in the future, not on expensive acquisitions of companies that are already well established.

Apparently, Beats was an exception. The Guardian reported not long before the acquisition that Beats headphones accounted for about 64 percent of all headphones sold at prices above $100 in the United States.

“A lot of the issues going around”

The topic of the session was “Curation in Media”—a subject that seems relevant given the Texture acquisition. As such, Cue also discussed Apple News, and again, he was careful to differentiate Apple’s philosophy from that of Google or Facebook. When asked about competitors’ strategies, Cue chose words that were polite and restrained while still carrying a critical subtext, saying, “it’s always hard to sit from the outside and talk about others,” and “when you have a large platform, there’s a lot of responsibility.”

Of Apple News, he said, “We want the best articles, we want them to look amazing, and we want them to be from trusted sources… so we don’t have a lot of the issues going around.” Cue is likely alluding to a whole host of challenges Google and Facebook have recently faced, from unverified news reports appearing in users’ feeds and search results to bots and algorithmically driven echo chambers.

That fits well with his choice of words in the Texture acquisition announcement: “We are committed to quality journalism from trusted sources.”

CNN’s Byers asked Cue about his thoughts on the open platform philosophy espoused by Google and Facebook. Cue pointed to iTunes—specifically podcasts—as an example of Apple leading the way on curation efforts, seeking a middle ground. Advocates of open platforms often talk of democratization, but they also bring up concerns about free speech with regard to closely curated, closed platforms. This is sometimes framed in contrast to activists who have pressed Twitter and other companies to clamp down on hate speech.