Product placement in TV series is a fairly common tactic for promoting a tech company's latest innovations. We've seen it not only in TV series but also in Hollywood movies dozens of times. A recent episode of the TV series House of Cards in which 9 Apple products appear in one scene has caused a bit of a stir on Engadget.
In the specific scene you see above, we can see nine Apple products, while the publication notes that in general the protagonists of the series - including Kevin Spacey - use Apple products.
Apple has previously claimed that it does not pay for product placement, even though it appears regularly in TV shows and movies.Engadget notes that there was no financial transaction for this particular episode.
The bottom line is that the show was given free equipment by Apple, and from what I hear the value of that equipment was significant compared to what competing companies were giving away – generally in the low tens of thousands of dollars. However, there was no monetary transaction. More importantly, there were no rules about how the Apple products would be used – that was up to the director, who gave Apple airtime as a 'thank you' for the equipment.
In this particular scene, there is an explanation for why so many devices were used at once. Because the two men were waiting for news about a specific event in the story, and because the assistant was monitoring police frequencies, the characters borrowed extra tablets and smartphones from colleagues to help with the task. They were Apple products because they had them at their disposal and because other companies – BlackBerry – did not fit the specific function.
House of Cards is the first television series to be financed and broadcast exclusively on the subscription platform Netflix. This is a great move with very important implications that other companies, such as Amazon and YouTube, want to gradually adopt.
