By: Nick Gambino
In a move that’s been a long time coming, Apple has dropped the “plus” from their streaming service. Instead of calling it Apple TV+ it’s now simply Apple TV.
The plus is a bad habit that a lot of these streamers thought they needed to sell themselves as some premier service. Hulu did it and smartly dropped it. Apple TV has jumped the plus ship and hopefully Disney will follow.
The thing about calling it Apple TV+ is the company offers other services where the “+” means something different. For example, iCloud is a free service, but they offer a paid version of the cloud service which they call iCloud+. There is no free version of the streamer, so this plus symbol is inconsistent across their products. For that reason, it’s smart to drop it.
Unfortunately, this rebranded title is going to cause some confusion. The tech giant sells a popular media player called Apple TV. Making things worse, there’s the Apple TV app that houses your library content and allows you to stream Apple TV (the streamer) movies and shows. So now there’s nothing to distinguish the streaming platform from the hardware device from the app in conversation. It’s already been confusing and now it’s about to get worse.
Along with the renaming, Apple TV is continuing their rebrand by debuting a new intro and sound.
The new logo that appears in the intro is very similar to the previous one but just without the highlighted plus symbol. It flips in a multicolored animation that’s not unlike NBC’s old logo reveal.
The sound or music that accompanies the 5-second intro bumper was designed by Finneas, Billie Eilish’s brother and long-time collaborator. The music producer wanted the jingle to evoke an iconic image much the way HBO’s static or Netflix’s “tudum” are so closely linked with those brands.
There are three versions of the intro – a 1-second, 5-second and 12-second version to be placed at the beginning of different videos. For example the longer one would appear before a movie playing in theaters.
