By Stephen Hackett

January 31, 2020 3:28 PM PT

The Hackett File: Changing the Virtual Channel

I watched and enjoyed both The Morning Show and For All Mankind. In fact, I’m excited to see where the shows go in their second season this year.

…and I haven’t looked at Apple TV+ since.

My wife and I are going to start the second season of Jack Ryan sometime soon, so the Amazon Prime app will see the light of day for a little while, and if something pops up on Netflix, we’ll then spend time there.

I hadn’t thought about this phenomenon until Jason and Myke answered a question about it on Upgrade #282, but I definitely hop around from service to service as we find things to watch on them.

We’re aren’t even cord-cutters — we have never paid for cable — but this is all starting to feel like cable. The abundance of content across the services we pay for is simply astonishing, but we are probably paying for things we don’t need or probably even want.

In this way, Apple TV+ is a little unique, as a large number of people — myself included — aren’t actually paying for it. Apple is giving away one year of Apple TV+ with the purchase of an Apple device.

The longer I think about it, the smarter this move seems to me. With its lack of back catalog or third-party content, there’s not much of a reason to return to Apple TV+ until the second season of its headline shows start. If customers were paying $4.99/month for the service, I think the majority of people would move on, and possibly never come back.

My assumption is that season two of the big shows on TV+ will begin a few weeks before the initial round of users signed up, prompting us all to pay to keep seeing what will happen on our favorite Apple-made shows.

[Stephen Hackett is the author of 512 Pixels and co-founder of Relay FM.]