Apple TV+ planning free preview weekend

Apple TV+ will temporarily lift its paywall from Jan. 3, 2025, to Jan. 5, 2025, providing non-subscribers with a chance to preview its offerings for free.

The tech giant announced that starting Friday, Jan. 3, and running through Sunday, Jan. 5, all of its premium content will be available at no cost.

The preview is expected to be available on any device that supports Apple TV+ and will allow users to watch recently-dropped series such as “Shrinking” and “Bad Sisters.” It will come ahead of the Jan. 17, 2025, release of the highly-anticipated second season of “Severance,” however.

Of course, the preview weekend harkens back to the days when premium cable channels such as Disney Channel and HBO would allow anyone with an active cable plan sample programming, a strategy that has also been carried over into the streaming world before with Netflix and others trying out similar approaches in the past. Apple itself has also offered live sports broadcasts for free, presumably as part of a strategy to lure interested viewers into sampling the content and, hopefully, signing up for a paid subscription. 

Apple TV+ normally costs $9.99 a month. It is also available via bundles Apple sells under the Apple One brand, which can deliver a better value for subscribers who can also receive services such as premium news publications, fitness content, music, cloud storage and email features. The service also has a free trial and the company has also given away free subscription periods with the purchase of new Apple devices. 

Launched in 2019, Apple TV+ maintains one of the smaller content libraries among premium streamers, though it has had its share of hits such as “Ted Lasso” and “The Morning Show.”

The service stands out among streamers in that it tends to only offer its own original programming and those shows have never been seen elsewhere (Apple TV, the broader streaming platform the company runs, sells video content from almost all major studios).

It’s difficult to tell exactly how well Apple TV+ is performing because the company reports its figures under its subscription services division, which includes data from Apple One and other plans. Estimates typically hover around 25 million paid subscribers, with double that if promotional offers are counted. Assuming those figures are correct, this represents about 0.2% of TV viewership in the U.S. or about 8% of the country’s streaming market.

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Offering a free preview weekend will likely allow Apple to get its content in front of more viewers than it can typically. Of course, there are likely to be viewers who simply hop on and binge whatever content they want and are unlikely to return as paid subscribers. However, Apple is presumably gambling that viewers might start exploring its broader content library and spot buzzy show titles or get hooked on a series that can’t be consumed in one weekend, forcing a paid sign-up.

A new or eligible previous subscriber could conceivably end up getting 10 days free by logging in for the free preview weekend and then signing up for the standard 7-day trial the service offers.