Apple’s streaming service is coming as soon as April, report says

Apple’s fabled subscription video service — the one we’ve been waiting for many, many years to come — might finally launch in April. 

This is according to a report from The Information, which focuses on how Amazon is getting ready for increasing competition in the video streaming space. 

Back in October, the same outlet said Apple was planning to launch the streaming service in the first half of 2019; now, the date has gotten a bit more precise. The Information claims Apple has told its content partners to be ready for launch by mid-April, with the actual launch happening within “several weeks” of that date. 

Alongside its own content, Apple will allegedly start offering users direct subscriptions to other services through its TV app, similar to what Roku has recently done with its Channel. 

There’s no more info about Apple’s side of things in the new report, but the October report claimed Apple was planning to launch the service in more than 100 countries, with the app first coming to the U.S. and then going global in the following months. 

Now that iPhone sales numbers aren’t what they used to be, Apple needs new revenue streams, and a video streaming service might just fit the bill. In January, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company plans to announce new services this year, but he stopped short of naming them. “There will be more things coming,” he told CNBC’s Jim Cramer. “They’re things that we feel really great about, that we’ve been working on for multiple years.”

As for Amazon, The Information claims the company is scaling back its TV streaming ambitions a little, and that it will become more selective about the content it offers in the future.