Apple TV: The Quiet Rebrand

From today onward, the streaming service formerly known as Apple TV+ will simply be called “Apple TV.”

In what feels like a footnote on its announcement of an official streaming date F1: The Movie on Apple TV+ … er, Apple TV, the company said it’s simplifying the brand:

Apple TV+ is now simply Apple TV, with a vibrant new identity.

We’ll likely have to wait to see what Apple means by a “vibrant new identity,” as so far everything looks pretty much the same. The icon for the TV app has gotten more colorful in the latest OS 26 betas, released earlier today. However, if anything, that just contributes to the confusion.

For a company obsessed with minimalism, Apple’s naming conventions have become a tangled mess.

Apple TV in Apple TV on Apple TV

It’s hard to tell whether Apple is intentionally muddying the waters or getting ahead of more upcoming announcements, but as of today, “Apple TV” now refers to three different things:

1. Apple’s set-top box: Released in 2007, it was the first semi-mainstream product to carry the Apple prefix. Several reports suggest that Apple wanted to call it “iTV” to stick with the rest of its “i” branding, but had rights problems with a UK TV network of the same name. Either way, for nearly a decade, “Apple TV” meant a hardware device, and nothing else.
2. Apple’s TV app: In 2015, Apple released a fourth-generation Apple TV, transitioning its set-top box to a full-fledged operating system it dubbed tvOS. In 2016, Apple introduced a TV app that would become a “universal content hub,” providing a single point of access for streaming content from multiple services. Most signed on pretty quickly; Netflix remains the last major holdout. Today, the Apple TV app is available on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple TV set-top box, but it’s also found on smart TVs, game consoles, and even Android smartphones.
3. The Service Formerly Known as Apple TV+: Apple significantly increased its services portfolio in 2019, and among these was a long-rumored streaming service it dubbed Apple TV+. For the past six years, this has been primarily the home of Apple Originals, but the company also has a small back catalog of content from the franchises it’s become the caretaker of, such as Peanuts and Fraggle Rock, and it occasionally runs limited-time free promotions of older movies from other studios. There’s also MLB Friday Night Baseball.

It’s probably fair to say that most people now think of the streaming service when they hear the name “Apple TV” — a testament to the company’s marketing of its original shows and films — but Apple’s branding has already created no small amount of confusion, and this latest change is just going to add to it.

I’ve often had to explain to non-technical folks that having the Apple TV app on their iPhone doesn’t automatically let them watch Ted Lasso. They need a subscription for that, which is why it’s Apple TV Plus. Also, you don’t need to buy an Apple TV to watch Apple TV+ (although I’m sure Apple would be more than happy to sell you one).

Now, things could get even weirder. You want to watch Slow Horses? It’s on Apple TV in the Apple TV app, which you can run on your Apple TV. Granted, that last part isn’t strictly necessary — and most folks wouldn’t care — but the app is a requirement for anyone who isn’t just watching through a browser on their Mac or PC. Having the plus sign there made it clear that the streaming service was something more than the app — and that the app wasn’t just a portal to the streaming service.

As John Gruber points out, it feels like watching Abbott and Costello’s classic Who’s on First routine.

The Apple+ Era

It’s an interesting twist, as Apple TV+ kicked off the era of Apple’s “plus” services, but in some ways, it’s also going back to some arguably simpler roots. Apple TV+ launched alongside Apple News+, and the company would later expand that into Apple Fitness+ and iCloud+. There have even been rumors of a Health+ service coming next year.

What most of these “plus” services have in common is that they take an existing app or service and expand on it. Apple News will aggregate news stories from hundreds of sources without requiring you to pay a dime to read them, while News+ gives you access to paywalled publications like The Wall Street Journal and
(more recently) The Washington Post along with over 200 digital magazine subscriptions.

Apple TV+ gives you Apple’s original content in the TV app alongside all the other streaming services (most of which require that you pay for them separately, but that’s another matter). Apple Fitness+ adds guided video workouts to the free Fitness app, and iCloud+ offers add-on features to those willing to pay for storage instead of relying on the paltry 5 GB that Apple gives away for free.

Then there’s Apple Music. Launched in 2015, long before plus signs were gleaming in Tim Cook’s eyes, it was never anything more (or less) than an all-you-can-listen streaming service. However, it didn’t launch the “Music” app on the iPhone; Apple had rebranded that from “iPod” in 2011. It just gave people a way to access a virtually unlimited catalog of songs instead of transferring their own music over from iTunes on a Mac or a PC.

By the convention that Apple adopted for TV, News, and Fitness, Apple’s streaming service should have been Apple Music+, but that never happened — even retroactively. Of course, not all services bear the plus suffix; Apple Arcade is a notable exception, but that’s because Apple never had anything like it previously. There’s never even been an “Arcade” app on anything but the Apple TV (set-top box); until recently, it’s been little more than an App Store section that can now also be found in Apple’s new Games app in iOS 26.