Apple TV+ is available on the Apple TV app with a seven-day free trial for new subscribers on iPhone, iPad, Apple TV 4K, Apple TV HD, Apple TV (3rd generation), iPod touch and Mac. For a limited time, customers who purchase a new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Mac or iPod touch starting September 10, 2019 can enjoy one year of Apple TV+ for free. So why are so few taking advantage of free Apple TV+ trials?
Apple TV+ is home to the biggest directors and top starsApple didn’t directly provide a lot of detail on its latest earnings call on the progress of its streaming-video service. But Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi did some nifty math from the hints the company provided, finding that less than 10% of customers eligible for 12 months of free Apple TV+ have signed up.
The question, obviously, is why so few?
One possibility is that Apple has not been very effective in promoting Apple TV+… Another potential explanation, he adds, is that Apple is deliberately going slow on the rollout of the service, in part to mitigate the negative accounting effect of the ramp-up. “Apple may be deliberately scaling its promotions of TV+ slowly, so that the most concerted promotions didn’t begin until after [fiscal] Q1, when the negative accounting impact to GAAP profits would lessen,” he wrote. Note that new users have three months to activate the free trial, after which the offer expires.
MacDailyNews Take: Regardless of whether Sacconaghi’s guesstimate is right or not, interest in Apple TV+ will build and accelerate over time as Apple’s service basically started from a standing start. As shows grab awards and headlines, as the number of series and content builds up, and Apple ramps up promotion, the service will naturally grow thanks to the simple math of new devices being purchased, each with a potential free year of Apple TV+. This service was always destined to start slowly then build and build, gathering steam over time!
I don’t think it’s a slow rollout, I think many people are not enamored with the content. there maybe a couple good shows, however IMHO that’s about it.
Could be wrong.. guess we’ll find out later this year if millions don’t renew the freebie subs.. assuming there is actually a way to figure that out..
I think we can summarize this as “its the content, stupid” /S … but ….
But its really is more than just content, but the timing of content.
The big difference between Apple and other players (Netflix; Disney) is that Apple just doesn’t have an existing huge catalog that perspective customers know that they can immediately go in and binge on…
Without that existing ‘deep’ catalog, customers aren’t inclined to spend the time/effort (and money, eventually) to kick around some unknown (even if well-reviewed) new serial(s).
Instead, the winning business model has been is to reel them with the deep library to binge, and then they’ll discover the new works (Hello, “Mandalorian”!) which are the hook to stick around.
As such, until Apple TV has a big library as the initial, its going to be a “bag of pain” of slow subscriber growth. That’s why they can’t even get big uptake rates into their existing customer bases even when they literally are giving it away.
Apple TV is a confusing mess. It offers me no value. I don’t watch TV, and want nothing to do with Jennier Aniston and other trash shows. So that content doesn’t work on me. The interface is terrible, I have no idea what “it” is, and why I’m supposed to use it. I fiddled with it and it’s worthless to me. I unsubscribed from the free trial, that’s how sucky Apple TV is to me.
Agreed, and too much of the content is ‘woke’ preachy content. Hard pass. Concentrate on entertainment, and if you want to spread a political message, do it elsewhere.
Hopefully many of the new shows on tap will focus on entertainment and keep the virtue shows to themselves.
We bought 5 eligible devices since the promo started, an Apple TV, a HomePod, 2 iPhones and a 16′ MacBook Pro. We are eligible for only one subscription, so four go unused.
I agree with paty,
1-My family got 3 elegible devices with no way of using at least 2 services (TV+ and arcade) even if arcade needed 2 elegible devices (like 50% off),
2-it was not clearly stated how to redeem ( I needed to help my Dad and tow uncles )
3-It is a mess because TV app shows a lot fo material with NO way to HIDE “pay for” material, so even if people have TV+, they don’t find the content. There should be a CLEAR top Menu with filters, and favorite services (to view the ones you pay for or are free).
I son’t like ahows trying to preach to me. For All Mankind was the worst. Yeah, seem to be well made shows but the writing is sub par. Like Running Windows on your Mac. Hardware looks runs great but inside doesn’t really match.
I signed up, realised there was nothing worth watching in about 5 mins, then promptly cancelled and deleted the app off my devices. I’m not the biggest TV watcher admittedly but the service just didn’t add anything worthwhile to my current mix of Netflix, Youtube and SBS On Demand.
The same way that somebody determined that the multiply-award-winning The Morning Show was worthless… by making a political, rather than artistic, judgment.
There just isn’t much of entertainment value. If you open up your window big and wide and look at everything there now, you don’t even want the free trial.
It’s the whole “go woke go broke” thing. Just as I get ready to click The Morning Show, I see those people, I recall their political statements, I realize that their multiple awards come from within their socio/political/bubble and my face begins to wrinkle, and I just don’t have the energy to be insulted for an hour, or watch an hour’s worth of propaganda.
Among all the people in the world, 3 types have dirt shit respect for me. Actors/entertainers, professional news casters, and politicians. Last thing in the world I want to see is a program concerning them. I’d rather watch vomit swirling in a toilet these days.
Those 3 types of folks use their vast control of mainstream media to regularly paint unflattering caricatures of me. That is their right, but I just don’t have the energy or desire to watch.
Like most people, I’d like to pour a glass of wine, flip open the iPad, and smile for a few moments in the evening. Instead I have to watch people who are richer than God tell me I’m a selfish, racist, homophobic, undesirable. I.e.thismis for the intellectual elite. You are not welcome here. Or I accidentally turn in CNN and instead of a single item of news there is nothing but anti-Trump propaganda and a trio of talking heads literally laughing and joking and demonstrating how stupid people like me are.
The message is clear. Change the channel. You are not welcome here.
Another truly brilliant summary by Thelonious, I’m serious. You have nailed my reaction to the offerings perfectly. If these self-important and under-educated dopes had kept their mouths shut about political feelings and not tried to bowl us over with their pedantic (ala Al Gore, anyone?) “superior thinking” (they are legends in their own minds and those of their ilk), and stuck with their talents and gifts instead then ithey wouldn’t anger millions of potential viewers who haven’t forgotten having been insulted on world-wide TV awards programs. We geezers have many decades of life experience and we don’t just ignore painfully learned insights and wisdom just because some highly paid pretenders confuse their popularity with being truly smart. They will never persuade us to abandon our survival and safety protections nor entrust them with the same.
Sit there and read the descriptions of the shows and comments.
With the iPhone 11 Plus Max came a free year. Before I committed to any of the series, I looked for reviews. Turns out the material is politically correct and preachy. I couldn’t find anything that is salvageable, though I tried. So we haven’t watched a single minute of Apple stuff.
You haven’t watched a “single minute minute of Apple stuff” and you “couldn’t find anything that is salvageable”, though you tried??? So you let other’s reviews shape your opinion… Perfect, can’t see anything wrong with that logic.
Look, my confirmation bias is only reinforced by the large majority of replies to this thread: people don’t like Apple’s stuff and for good reason. Truth be told, we also have Amazon Prime Video (comes for free with Prime) and Netflix (brother has give us for free one of his three logins) and we hardly ever watch anything as most of it is also unwatchable dreck.
Having said that, last week re-watched The Lord of the Rings on either Netflix or Amazon. Can’t remember which one.
Psst – because it sucks. I don’t care how big budget they are, or what Hollywood shills at the Emmys desperate to appear relevant in the 21st century say – their shows aren’t good. Whatever made them think they were the right ones to do this probably leads directly back and exclusively to Eddie Cue. To be fair, neither are the other streaming services’, but they have all those licenses, see. We are beginning to see the effect of Silicon Valley hubris on ‘cord cutting’ (which is shaping up to be worse than cable TV). I’ll pass, and my Arcade membership is likely next, the regular app store is better and cheaper in the long run, at least currently.
It was never going to be any good even in the best of times HBO had at most two shows worth watching in any calendar year for most of the last twenty years…..
Activating the subscription wasn’t exactly straightforward. So I guess a lot of people haven’t go to it.
Hell maybe a lot of people haven’t found the Apple TV app yet.
I liked “See” but that was it. My wife bought a new iMac and only found one show she liked and that was it. She told me she’s going to cancel it after that.
Now people might have a go at Amazon and Netflix and some of their shows don’t tickle my fancy but there are a lot of other content that is quite OK. Apple needs to lift their game really quick or they’ll be steam rollered by the likes of Disney+, Amazon and Netflix. Quality is all very good but quantity and choice rule!
Since it is no more preachy and political than the rest of tv, movies, news, etc. I should think Apple’s stuff will find its audience soon enough. They aren’t suffering because the likes of me aren’t watching, I suspect it’s mostly streaming fatigue. Are they still going to do the Foundation series? I’ll subscribe for that.
I had a service call to a new client today ( I provide onsite technology services) needing help with his Macs, iPad, and a new iPhone 11. I pointed out the free offer for Apple TV+ due to his iPhone 11 purchase. He then had me take him thru the steps to sign up but his free subscription required him to add a credit card to his iCloud account which is something he is unwilling to do. He doesn’t need any paid apps and doesn’t yet need more than the 5GB of free iCloud space. So he decided he could take a pass on Apple TV+.
We travel, a lot. My account has a credit card, but my wife’s does not, purposefully. This way we can freely change her country App store, and quite often access apps not available in the U.S. store. It’s paid off for us numerous times in numerous countries.
Mine, on the contrary, is locked hard to the U.S. because if I try to change the country, it asks me to input a means of payment of the new country.
I enjoyed Servant 1 season so far. I watched 1 1/2 episodes of See before I gave that up due to the ridiculousness of it. I’ll keep it for the free year but after that, nah.
I just received a 1 year subscription and honestly I find it worthless. There are a handful of shows I can watch, but from what I see or want to see 80%+ require an additional rental fee on top of the membership. Not sure what the 9.99 per month gets you. Apple blew this one when you compare it with the other services out there. Lousy offering and interface. Swing and a miss here. Very disappointed.
It isn’t $9.99, it is $4.99. It has nothing to do with renting anything. Because the Apple TV APP is a multipurpose app, it can be used to watch Apple TV+ (subscription service), other content providers’ channels, etc as well as to buy and rent movies and TV shows from a form of what used to be called the iTunes Store. The App is a type of all-in-one app. Apple’s subscription streaming service is called Apple TV+ and is its own “channel” right alongside the other providers’ channels.
Back in Jan 2020, I purchased a new iPad Pro and was happy. It gave me a boost to the storage of my 4 year old iPad Pro 9.7″ and was faster. Then I noticed these ads foisted upon me by Apple
saying “Sign up for your free year of Apple TV +.” I like a lot of people get pissed off when something on the Apple iDevice takes it upon itself to forces ads on us that you can’t disable. So to make the whole wretched experience vanish, I signed up and immediately cancelled the subscription.
I don’t care if Apple wanted to give Apple TV+ away for free forever, I don’t like being told by Apple what services I need in my life. If the service was that good, then I might have signed up for it, but months of adverts extolling the virtues of Jennifer Aniston on the Morning Show turned me off the whole idea, sorry Jennifer, but I find you annoying. As if to ram it home, I wasn’t enticed by anything else on their platform and still am not.
The Apple TV+ experience sounds a lot like Siri, huge promise that is ultimately let down by a useless and badly thought out user experience. Hell, that’s not the only bad thing from the Apple lately, touch bar and butterfly keys come to mind. From what I’ve seen, the TV app interface is a lesson in frustration that covers up for poor content quantity with extra paid stuff. That would be all well and good, but not when it is almost deliberately obscuring the paid content. Sounds more like desperate money grab to hide the real problem, which is that quality content is not an over night thing. It takes years to make it work, and even with a 2+ trillion dollar company behind it, the problems aint going away.
Strange how Apple TV+ didn’t learn a lesson from Apple Music, where they didn’t create exclusive content for Apple Music, they licensed all the content. Sure they signed up artists, but what about the back catalogue. Can we image the success of Apple Music if they had only a couple of dozen albums after a year or two, wouldn’t be the success if is now would it. Seems Apple need to examine what they are trying to do here.
Even when I buy another iDevice from Apple in the next year or two, I still wont sign up for the service. Ultimately it is controlled by a company that is more strict with its image than Kim Jung Un, whilst being focused on the wrong things for the wrong reasons. In other words I am no friend of Apple TV +.
Upon reading your long post, you CAN make the “Sign up for your free year of Apple TV +” prompt if you want to. I have yet to find any person other than you who gets “pissed off” that Apple made them aware of a fringe benefit from buying a qualifying Apple device to get a years worth of this service for free. 90% or more of those I support and communicate with took Apple up on this offer. Time will tell if they keep the service after the free trial expires this summer. You need to check out the free trial of Fitness+ and immerse yourself in its yoga as well as their dedicated cooldowns because you seem to be excessively stressed about this 14 months later. Peace be with you.
I don’t think it’s a slow rollout, I think many people are not enamored with the content. there maybe a couple good shows, however IMHO that’s about it.
Could be wrong.. guess we’ll find out later this year if millions don’t renew the freebie subs.. assuming there is actually a way to figure that out..
I’m in agreement
I think we can summarize this as “its the content, stupid” /S … but ….
But its really is more than just content, but the timing of content.
The big difference between Apple and other players (Netflix; Disney) is that Apple just doesn’t have an existing huge catalog that perspective customers know that they can immediately go in and binge on…
Without that existing ‘deep’ catalog, customers aren’t inclined to spend the time/effort (and money, eventually) to kick around some unknown (even if well-reviewed) new serial(s).
Instead, the winning business model has been is to reel them with the deep library to binge, and then they’ll discover the new works (Hello, “Mandalorian”!) which are the hook to stick around.
As such, until Apple TV has a big library as the initial, its going to be a “bag of pain” of slow subscriber growth. That’s why they can’t even get big uptake rates into their existing customer bases even when they literally are giving it away.
Apple TV is a confusing mess. It offers me no value. I don’t watch TV, and want nothing to do with Jennier Aniston and other trash shows. So that content doesn’t work on me. The interface is terrible, I have no idea what “it” is, and why I’m supposed to use it. I fiddled with it and it’s worthless to me. I unsubscribed from the free trial, that’s how sucky Apple TV is to me.
Agreed, and too much of the content is ‘woke’ preachy content. Hard pass. Concentrate on entertainment, and if you want to spread a political message, do it elsewhere.
Hopefully many of the new shows on tap will focus on entertainment and keep the virtue shows to themselves.
Imagine the idea that art should make some commentary on the human condition. Oh what were they thinking………….
woke preachy content will dull the mind
Free 12 month Apple Plus Trial. But have to rent/buy 75% of the content…. Am I missing something Apple?
We bought 5 eligible devices since the promo started, an Apple TV, a HomePod, 2 iPhones and a 16′ MacBook Pro. We are eligible for only one subscription, so four go unused.
If you bought and activated them on different Apple IDs, you’d be eligible for all of them.
If they’re all under a single family plan, what’s the point of each AppleID in the family signing up for the trial?
I agree with paty,
1-My family got 3 elegible devices with no way of using at least 2 services (TV+ and arcade) even if arcade needed 2 elegible devices (like 50% off),
2-it was not clearly stated how to redeem ( I needed to help my Dad and tow uncles )
3-It is a mess because TV app shows a lot fo material with NO way to HIDE “pay for” material, so even if people have TV+, they don’t find the content. There should be a CLEAR top Menu with filters, and favorite services (to view the ones you pay for or are free).
I son’t like ahows trying to preach to me. For All Mankind was the worst. Yeah, seem to be well made shows but the writing is sub par. Like Running Windows on your Mac. Hardware looks runs great but inside doesn’t really match.
Apple TV+ content is way too preachy. Way too politically correct. Mostly boring.
I signed up, realised there was nothing worth watching in about 5 mins, then promptly cancelled and deleted the app off my devices. I’m not the biggest TV watcher admittedly but the service just didn’t add anything worthwhile to my current mix of Netflix, Youtube and SBS On Demand.
Not trying to be an ass, but… How could you realize there was nothing worth watching in about 5 mins?
The same way that somebody determined that the multiply-award-winning The Morning Show was worthless… by making a political, rather than artistic, judgment.
There just isn’t much of entertainment value. If you open up your window big and wide and look at everything there now, you don’t even want the free trial.
It’s the whole “go woke go broke” thing. Just as I get ready to click The Morning Show, I see those people, I recall their political statements, I realize that their multiple awards come from within their socio/political/bubble and my face begins to wrinkle, and I just don’t have the energy to be insulted for an hour, or watch an hour’s worth of propaganda.
Among all the people in the world, 3 types have dirt shit respect for me. Actors/entertainers, professional news casters, and politicians. Last thing in the world I want to see is a program concerning them. I’d rather watch vomit swirling in a toilet these days.
Those 3 types of folks use their vast control of mainstream media to regularly paint unflattering caricatures of me. That is their right, but I just don’t have the energy or desire to watch.
Like most people, I’d like to pour a glass of wine, flip open the iPad, and smile for a few moments in the evening. Instead I have to watch people who are richer than God tell me I’m a selfish, racist, homophobic, undesirable. I.e.thismis for the intellectual elite. You are not welcome here. Or I accidentally turn in CNN and instead of a single item of news there is nothing but anti-Trump propaganda and a trio of talking heads literally laughing and joking and demonstrating how stupid people like me are.
The message is clear. Change the channel. You are not welcome here.
Another truly brilliant summary by Thelonious, I’m serious. You have nailed my reaction to the offerings perfectly. If these self-important and under-educated dopes had kept their mouths shut about political feelings and not tried to bowl us over with their pedantic (ala Al Gore, anyone?) “superior thinking” (they are legends in their own minds and those of their ilk), and stuck with their talents and gifts instead then ithey wouldn’t anger millions of potential viewers who haven’t forgotten having been insulted on world-wide TV awards programs. We geezers have many decades of life experience and we don’t just ignore painfully learned insights and wisdom just because some highly paid pretenders confuse their popularity with being truly smart. They will never persuade us to abandon our survival and safety protections nor entrust them with the same.
Sit there and read the descriptions of the shows and comments.
With the iPhone 11 Plus Max came a free year. Before I committed to any of the series, I looked for reviews. Turns out the material is politically correct and preachy. I couldn’t find anything that is salvageable, though I tried. So we haven’t watched a single minute of Apple stuff.
You haven’t watched a “single minute minute of Apple stuff” and you “couldn’t find anything that is salvageable”, though you tried??? So you let other’s reviews shape your opinion… Perfect, can’t see anything wrong with that logic.
Look, my confirmation bias is only reinforced by the large majority of replies to this thread: people don’t like Apple’s stuff and for good reason. Truth be told, we also have Amazon Prime Video (comes for free with Prime) and Netflix (brother has give us for free one of his three logins) and we hardly ever watch anything as most of it is also unwatchable dreck.
Having said that, last week re-watched The Lord of the Rings on either Netflix or Amazon. Can’t remember which one.
I wouldn’t let my 12 year old child watch most of the shows due to content issue. Also, the shows too hidden in the muck of all the others shows.
Psst – because it sucks. I don’t care how big budget they are, or what Hollywood shills at the Emmys desperate to appear relevant in the 21st century say – their shows aren’t good. Whatever made them think they were the right ones to do this probably leads directly back and exclusively to Eddie Cue. To be fair, neither are the other streaming services’, but they have all those licenses, see. We are beginning to see the effect of Silicon Valley hubris on ‘cord cutting’ (which is shaping up to be worse than cable TV). I’ll pass, and my Arcade membership is likely next, the regular app store is better and cheaper in the long run, at least currently.
It was never going to be any good even in the best of times HBO had at most two shows worth watching in any calendar year for most of the last twenty years…..
Activating the subscription wasn’t exactly straightforward. So I guess a lot of people haven’t go to it.
Hell maybe a lot of people haven’t found the Apple TV app yet.
I liked “See” but that was it. My wife bought a new iMac and only found one show she liked and that was it. She told me she’s going to cancel it after that.
Now people might have a go at Amazon and Netflix and some of their shows don’t tickle my fancy but there are a lot of other content that is quite OK. Apple needs to lift their game really quick or they’ll be steam rollered by the likes of Disney+, Amazon and Netflix. Quality is all very good but quantity and choice rule!
If the trial was 30 days, there might be more people trying it out.
As Steve would say, it’s a empty bag of hurt…
The interface is horrific. The content is political nonsense. I just find it unwatchable.
Since it is no more preachy and political than the rest of tv, movies, news, etc. I should think Apple’s stuff will find its audience soon enough. They aren’t suffering because the likes of me aren’t watching, I suspect it’s mostly streaming fatigue. Are they still going to do the Foundation series? I’ll subscribe for that.
Foundation (the books) were dull, not for the mainstream good luck Apple you will need it…
I had a service call to a new client today ( I provide onsite technology services) needing help with his Macs, iPad, and a new iPhone 11. I pointed out the free offer for Apple TV+ due to his iPhone 11 purchase. He then had me take him thru the steps to sign up but his free subscription required him to add a credit card to his iCloud account which is something he is unwilling to do. He doesn’t need any paid apps and doesn’t yet need more than the 5GB of free iCloud space. So he decided he could take a pass on Apple TV+.
We travel, a lot. My account has a credit card, but my wife’s does not, purposefully. This way we can freely change her country App store, and quite often access apps not available in the U.S. store. It’s paid off for us numerous times in numerous countries.
Mine, on the contrary, is locked hard to the U.S. because if I try to change the country, it asks me to input a means of payment of the new country.
I enjoyed Servant 1 season so far. I watched 1 1/2 episodes of See before I gave that up due to the ridiculousness of it. I’ll keep it for the free year but after that, nah.
I just received a 1 year subscription and honestly I find it worthless. There are a handful of shows I can watch, but from what I see or want to see 80%+ require an additional rental fee on top of the membership. Not sure what the 9.99 per month gets you. Apple blew this one when you compare it with the other services out there. Lousy offering and interface. Swing and a miss here. Very disappointed.
It isn’t $9.99, it is $4.99. It has nothing to do with renting anything. Because the Apple TV APP is a multipurpose app, it can be used to watch Apple TV+ (subscription service), other content providers’ channels, etc as well as to buy and rent movies and TV shows from a form of what used to be called the iTunes Store. The App is a type of all-in-one app. Apple’s subscription streaming service is called Apple TV+ and is its own “channel” right alongside the other providers’ channels.
Back in Jan 2020, I purchased a new iPad Pro and was happy. It gave me a boost to the storage of my 4 year old iPad Pro 9.7″ and was faster. Then I noticed these ads foisted upon me by Apple
saying “Sign up for your free year of Apple TV +.” I like a lot of people get pissed off when something on the Apple iDevice takes it upon itself to forces ads on us that you can’t disable. So to make the whole wretched experience vanish, I signed up and immediately cancelled the subscription.
I don’t care if Apple wanted to give Apple TV+ away for free forever, I don’t like being told by Apple what services I need in my life. If the service was that good, then I might have signed up for it, but months of adverts extolling the virtues of Jennifer Aniston on the Morning Show turned me off the whole idea, sorry Jennifer, but I find you annoying. As if to ram it home, I wasn’t enticed by anything else on their platform and still am not.
The Apple TV+ experience sounds a lot like Siri, huge promise that is ultimately let down by a useless and badly thought out user experience. Hell, that’s not the only bad thing from the Apple lately, touch bar and butterfly keys come to mind. From what I’ve seen, the TV app interface is a lesson in frustration that covers up for poor content quantity with extra paid stuff. That would be all well and good, but not when it is almost deliberately obscuring the paid content. Sounds more like desperate money grab to hide the real problem, which is that quality content is not an over night thing. It takes years to make it work, and even with a 2+ trillion dollar company behind it, the problems aint going away.
Strange how Apple TV+ didn’t learn a lesson from Apple Music, where they didn’t create exclusive content for Apple Music, they licensed all the content. Sure they signed up artists, but what about the back catalogue. Can we image the success of Apple Music if they had only a couple of dozen albums after a year or two, wouldn’t be the success if is now would it. Seems Apple need to examine what they are trying to do here.
Even when I buy another iDevice from Apple in the next year or two, I still wont sign up for the service. Ultimately it is controlled by a company that is more strict with its image than Kim Jung Un, whilst being focused on the wrong things for the wrong reasons. In other words I am no friend of Apple TV +.
Wow….don’t you realize you are 13 months late to this story?! LOLOL
Some stories just don’t get old though.
Upon reading your long post, you CAN make the “Sign up for your free year of Apple TV +” prompt if you want to. I have yet to find any person other than you who gets “pissed off” that Apple made them aware of a fringe benefit from buying a qualifying Apple device to get a years worth of this service for free. 90% or more of those I support and communicate with took Apple up on this offer. Time will tell if they keep the service after the free trial expires this summer. You need to check out the free trial of Fitness+ and immerse yourself in its yoga as well as their dedicated cooldowns because you seem to be excessively stressed about this 14 months later. Peace be with you.