I know various sites had reported it but I have now received an email announcing “We’re extending your free year of Apple TV+ until February.”
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That email was a good reminder to move my “Unsubscribe from AppleTV+” task to the end of January.
I doubt if the service has been a major success so far. Extending the free subscriptions could be a way to keep most of the free users on board until they can come up with some more original content. Or it might be a way to keep a Quibi type exodus from showing up in their first quarter results. Perhaps it’s both.
I’ve really enjoyed a small number of programs but there’s never been enough to keep me subscribed year round.
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Not received mine yet, though not sure if it’s going to be extended outside of the states.
I got mine, since I have yet to watch anything on Apple TV I’m not sure how it applies but I will investigate making sure I turn it off at the end of the trial.
So far the only things I foudnon the service that I wanted to see were all pay per view and extra cost, so totally not worth it. Especially since we already have Netflix, Amazon Prime and Kodi.
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Everything on AppleTV+ is free to watch while you have the free trial or a paid subscription. The interplay between it and Apple’s TV app is a bit confusing as Apple uses the TV app to suggest things from a lot of different TV channels and from iTunes rentals—you need to select TV+ in the list of channels to see only what’s available to you for free through it.
I’m also curious about those subscription figures. My take on this extension is that Apple One will not be rolling out as soon as they thought it would, and they really want to keep the trials active to assist conversion into Apple One subscriptions in some way. Early October expiration also misses a lot of the second seasons of the first round of shows, especially if some releases were COVID delayed.
That’s probably where I went wrong.
I also want to mention that the integration to stream to a TV is terrible. We never got it running onto our TV yet we have a Chromecast and a Firestick all working fine and have also cast things from Acorn to the TV so in general it works just not with the Apple TV app. So that meant watching on my Mac which is problematic. I may give it a shot again but I’m not sure. Seems like a lot of work for very little extra in terms of content. I’m more likely to buy Disney streaming or Acorn than to continue with Apple TV+.
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You’re saying that you were able to Airplay Acorn to your TV, but you can’t Airplay from the TV app? Do you have trouble with other apps using AirPlay? The TV app appears to have a pretty standard implementation, but I don’t have experience with a wide variety of AirPlay targets.
Acorn was sent using an Android phone as that is who had the subscription to it. I tried to send Aplle stuff with my iPhone and was unsuccessful and gave up. We had other things to watch so no big deal.
I’ve enjoyed a few shows, but I don’t think it’s worth paying for. Netflix, HBO and Hulu give me way more content than I’ll ever be able to watch. At some point there has to be a consolidation of all these paid subscriptions, right?
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Right. That’s why I don’t keep any streaming service full time. Only when a new season of something I like has concluded on a streaming service, or Netflix, etc. has some new movies. For example, the Mandalorian season 2 starts at the end of the month on Disney so I’ll probably re-subscribe to Disney in January for a month.
And when no one has anything worth watching, I go old school. I read books 
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I definitely get value from AppleTV+ (even when I have to start paying). Love some of the stuff they have been putting out!
That being said, I’ll most likely turn it on/off when I need to.
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Or get Kodi, that works too.
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