Apple TV+ Will Change Its Name
I love Severance as much as the next TV fan (though I admit I’m constantly avoiding Ted Lasso —sorry), but I have to admit: no one calls the service these shows air on “Apple TV+.” And now they don’t have to, because the streaming service has a new name.
I understand what Apple was trying to achieve with the “+” symbol. They already had the Apple TV streaming box and the paid Apple TV app, so they needed to name their subscription streaming platform something else. But everyone I’ve ever spoken to about Apple TV+ shows, whether online or in person, has typically omitted the “plus” from the name, perhaps even forgetting it even exists—especially considering the aforementioned paid app, without the “plus,” is still used to watch Apple TV+ content.
Now it looks like even Apple is ditching the name and just doing the same thing all my friends and family have been intuitively doing for years, as the company quietly acknowledged at the end of a press release earlier today that Apple TV+ will now simply be called Apple TV .
Why Apple TV+ is gone
Despite the conflict with other Apple products, this makes sense… for the most part. Apple TV+ is a hard name to pronounce, a bit redundant, and too similar to Paramount+ or Disney+ (services I don’t particularly like). My brain naturally wants to call the app I use to watch Apple content “Apple TV.” It could also be argued that the Apple TV+ platform name implies that an Apple TV device is required to watch it, so perhaps the new name is more descriptive than the old one.
However, as sensible as this decision may be, Apple is keeping this announcement under wraps. It appeared at the end of a post about the subscription release of Formula 1: The Movie (scheduled for December 12th, by the way), and it doesn’t seem particularly accurate. All that’s known is that, according to the company, “Apple TV+ is now just Apple TV, with a bold new look.” At the time of writing, neither the Apple TV app nor the Apple TV+ website have been updated to reflect the new name, so you can only guess what the rebranding will look like once it launches. It could be a major relaunch with a new user interface, or it could be a quiet change that Apple will try to implement as discreetly as possible.
In any case, if you see the Apple TV+ brand disappearing from the Apple TV app, here’s why. All your subscription content will still be there, just without the plus sign next to it. So the main question is how this will affect Apple’s paid video store or its Apple TV.
What will happen to the old Apple TV?
In the first case, it seems there won’t be any major changes, as Apple’s Formula 1 blog post acknowledges that while the film isn’t currently available for streaming on the renamed Apple TV subscription, it can only be purchased in the expanded Apple TV app. This means that the subscription service and the rest of the app will continue to operate as separate entities going forward, and while their shared name is a bit confusing, I can’t say the Apple TV+ moniker is a great solution to this problem. Instead, subscription series will likely simply receive minor visual tweaks to the section they already reside in in the Apple TV app.
But how does this affect hardware, specifically the Apple TV streaming box? I could imagine it might be a bit more confusing. Imagine a less literate family member buying a physical Apple TV from Walmart, only to discover they still have to pay a subscription to watch Apple TV shows. For all its flaws, “Apple TV+” at least implied that buying an Apple streaming box doesn’t automatically grant you access to its programming (though, again, you can watch these shows without an Apple TV).
However, a solution to this problem may be on the horizon: according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman , a consistently accurate predictor of everything Apple, the company is set to announce a new MacBook lineup later this week. Could the Apple TV+ name change mean we’ll see a rebranding of the Apple TV streaming box alongside these new laptops? We might find out soon.