Ted Lasso and Severance are raising its profile and subscriber numbers, but streaming platform Apple TV+ is still losing over $1bn a year according to a report.
Apple’s streaming platform Apple TV+ is over five years old now, but the tech giant is still losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year if a new report is accurate. According to the Information (via TheWrap), Apple TV+ is losing over $1bn a year for its wider company – and that’s despite growing its subscriber base and trimming costs in 2024.
Since its launch in November 2019, Apple TV+ has rapidly built up a library of original movies and TV shows, having spent generously on such output as Ridley Scott’s Napoleon and Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon. Such series as Ted Lasso and Severance have also helped grow its subscriber base, and the platform is fast becoming something of a haven for intelligent sci-fi shows; as well as the aforementioned Severance, there’s Silo, Foundation, and For All Mankind, while Murderbot is due to stream this spring. An adaptation of William Gibson’s Neuromancer is also in the works.
According to the Information’s numbers, though, Apple TV+’s user base is growing yet still small compared to its biggest rivals. Apple is reticent about sharing internal data, but it’s reported that its platform may have around 40.4m subscribers as of the end of 2024 – a number dwarfed by Netflix’s 301.6m or Disney+’s 124.6m users.
In other stats, Apple is thought to spend over $5bn a year on films and TV shows for its platform. That figure was said to have been pared down by about 10 percent in 2024, but all the same – Apple TV+ isn’t currently pulling in the number of subscribers it needs to cover its own huge expenditure, and probably won’t for many years yet.
Apple as a whole has such a vast stock market valuation – $3.26tn – that it can absolutely afford to lose money on the streaming side of its business. But even so, it illustrates where things currently stand in the topsy-turvy entertainment industry in 2025.
Between them, tech companies have created a climate where customers can get access to thousands of hours of media for a relatively small monthly access fee. The only sticking point is, it costs billions of dollars in investors’ money to stop those subscribers cancelling their subscriptions and moving to another service. Netflix does actually turn a profit, having spent $17bn on making things for people to watch in 2024 but bringing in $39bn in revenue from its subscribers.
Disney+, meanwhile, spent $25bn on its shows and films in 2024, the year it finally made its first operating profit of $47m. The previous year it lost $387m.
Streaming services offer convenience to subscribers and some pretty darn watchable pieces of entertainment. The costs involved remain frighteningly high.
