I was thrilled this week when Apple issued a press release announcing that its original film, F1 The Movie, starring Brad Pitt, would make its streaming debut on the company’s video service December 12. But it wasn’t the news about the movie that excited me. Rather, it was a small line at the end of the press release that quietly announced something else: “Apple TV+ is now simply Apple TV, with a vibrant new identity.”
The “+” branding on Apple TV+ always bugged me. Whenever I looked at it, I thought, “Apple TV plus what?” Apple News offers a free base version and a paid version that gets you more content, called “Apple News+,” which makes sense. But there’s never been a free version of Apple’s video streaming service, so what was the “+” signifying? The “+” branding had also grown increasingly tiresome over the years, as nearly every streaming service added the mathematical operator onto its name.
Mercifully, Apple has now decided to subtract the plus. Here’s the why, and how the company could go further toward to ending branding’s most tiresome scourge.
The company didn’t invent the “+”, but it embraced it like no other
Until this week, Apple had been leaning hard into the “+” branding for years—nearly as hard as it did to the much more iconic “i” branding in the early 2000s.
Apple debuted its first “+” branding all the way back in October 2011 with its AppleCare+ extended warranty program, which covered accidental damage to a user’s iPhone. It used an alphabetic version of the nomenclature with the iPhone 6 “Plus” model in 2014. But it wasn’t until 2019 that Apple began to go hog wild on “+”.
That year, Apple debuted the Apple News+ news subscription service and the Apple TV+ video streaming service. A year later, in 2020, Apple debuted the Apple Fitness+ workout streaming service, and a year after that, the company added its latest “+” service, iCloud+.
Yet Apple wasn’t the first tech or media company to tack “+” onto a product. The earliest I can remember is NBC Universal’s and News Corp’s “Hulu Plus” back in 2010, and then, several months before Apple debuted AppleCare+ in 2011, Google came out with its now-defunct social network Google+. The next major company to embrace the “+” was Disney, with ESPN+ in 2018.
However, the “+” really went viral in the final months of 2019. In September of that year, BET launched BET+. Two months later, Apple TV+ and the streaming giant Disney+ arrived. In the years that followed, we got more: Discovery+, Paramount+, AMC+, the short-lived CNN+, and more.
But it was Apple, with its no fewer than five “+” products, that was the clear cross-bearer—sorry, plus-bearer—for the techno-media industries.
Apple explains why it killed off the Apple TV “+”
Apple’s announcement to drop the “+” from Apple TV+ this week came out of the blue. However, shortly after the abrupt name change, the company explained its reasoning.
In an appearance on The Town podcast (via 9to5Mac), Apple’s senior vice president of Services, Eddy Cue, who oversees products including Apple Music, Apple News, and the newly named Apple TV, spoke about the subtraction of the “+”. Cue revealed that the company originally named its streaming service “Apple TV+” simply because Apple had used the “+” mark in its other subscription services, such as Apple News+ and iCloud+.
“But we do that when we have a free service and then there’s a paid version,” Cue acknowledged, noting the distinction between Apple TV and the company’s other paid services.
“We stayed consistent because of it,” Cue continued, admitting, “but we all called it Apple TV, and we said, given where we are today [with the service’s brand awareness], it’s a great time to [ditch the “+”], so let’s just do it.”
Apple shows no signs of entirely abandoning the “+”
My colleague, Grace Snelling, spoke to several branding experts the wake of the Apple TV service rebrand. They all seem to agree that Apple made the right move in dropping the +.
As Snelling noted, in the early days of the streaming wars that began in 2019, the “+” addendum attached to a name served as an easy identifier, indicating that the product being sold was a streaming service. However, now that the symbol has become ubiquitous, it has lost some of its branding power. As Cue pointed out, the Apple TV streaming service brand is now strong enough that the “+” is no longer needed.
Yet while Apple has now subtracted the “+” from Apple TV, the company remains firmly on the “+” side of the equation. Four of its products still carry the mathematical moniker: Apple News+, iCloud+, Apple Fitness+, and AppleCare+. Here, the + makes more sense than it ever did on Apple TV, since it signifies additional features. Cue’s comments suggest that Apple has no intention of eliminating the “+” from the rest of this product lineup.
Still, it’s worth noting that the removal of “+” from Apple TV’s name isn’t the first time in 2025 that Apple has eliminated the symbol from one of its products. In September, Apple replaced the iPhone Plus model in its smartphone lineup with the new iPhone Air.
