Apple TV+ Free Year Trials Extended Again
Any current customers with free trials set to end in the February to June period will now see those subscription renewals pushed out to July. Similarly, customers with an annual subscription that expires between February and June will also get the same additional months of service at no additional charge.
I am not surprised that they have to do this. Even before COVID struck, I was mentally modelling that they would need to repeat the free year trials at least one time over. The mechanics are slightly different to what I had predicted. In my head, I expected them to simply re-up the hardware offer; buy another Apple device, get another year.
What Apple has done instead is push back the renewal dates of those active trials. If you subscribed on the same day as the service launched — November 1st, 2019 — your free promotion essentially lasts nine extra months.
A subscription that was originally set to end on November 1, 2020 will now continue until July. However, anyone subscribing for the first time sees no such benefits. If you activate a new Apple device from today, your renewal date will be exactly one year out. Reading between the lines, Apple believes (or at least hopes) a TV+ subscription will be worth paying for in July.
Again, this should not come as a surprise to anyone. A library of exclusive newly-made originals takes time to build up. What is a little bizarre is why they didn’t announce the July date in October. It is surely a little embarrassing for Apple that they have trot back to the press to announce another extension of the ‘one year’ trials so soon, when the first extension happened so recently that it is still fresh in people’s minds. It feels like a public echo of internal flip-flopping.
Marking TV+ down as a failure at this stage is simply premature. I don’t know if it’s going to be a long-term success … but I recognise it’s too early to call it either way. It is true that If the TV+ strategy was adopted by a startup, of course it would fail; a standalone company simply doesn’t have the resources to backstop the early years of growth. For Apple, financials are not a practical concern. As long as it is committed at the executive levels to invest fiercely in originals for three-to-five years, accepting little to no monetary return in the meantime, it should be fine.