Apple TV Requires You To Have an iPhone To Accept New iCloud Terms and Conditions (9to5mac.com) 99
An anonymous reader shares a report: A viral tweet today highlights a somewhat frustrating limitation with the Apple TV software. As of a recent software update, tvOS expects users have access to an iPhone or iPad in order to do things like accept new iCloud terms and conditions, or update their Apple ID settings. Although most people who use the Apple TV 4K box are deeply ensconced in the Apple ecosystem, this doesn't apply to everyone. Up until recently, the Apple TV could be used essentially independently. It was assumed to be a standalone device, not an accessory. Not so much, anymore. Moreover, these changes mean Apple TV users who have Macs -- but no personal iOS devices -- are also left in the lurch.
Most of the Apple TV can be used without needing access to other Apple hardware. You can set up the Apple TV from scratch completely independently, install apps, and make purchases. Typical Apple ID management duties can be performed from a web browser on a PC, if occasionally necessary. However, there are some tasks -- seemingly more prevalent than ever as of tvOS 16 -- that the Apple TV expects you to do on an iOS device signed in with the same account. This viral tweet from @hugelgupf showcases perhaps the most egregious example: accepting new iCloud terms and conditions requires an iOS device.
Most of the Apple TV can be used without needing access to other Apple hardware. You can set up the Apple TV from scratch completely independently, install apps, and make purchases. Typical Apple ID management duties can be performed from a web browser on a PC, if occasionally necessary. However, there are some tasks -- seemingly more prevalent than ever as of tvOS 16 -- that the Apple TV expects you to do on an iOS device signed in with the same account. This viral tweet from @hugelgupf showcases perhaps the most egregious example: accepting new iCloud terms and conditions requires an iOS device.
New slogan for Apple: (Score:5, Funny)
"Apple: Think Arrogance"
Have not been impressed with apple tv. (Score:2)
Like Apple Arcade for the TV. Crappy stuff that Apple thinks is 'Genius' the rest of us are like 'it's crap'. There are a couple of good flicks.. by and large I could skip it. I could never get into the Ted Lasso thing. I have a Iphone11 currently thinking about going Samsung + Lineage OS and giving my apple watch to my wife.
Re:Have not been impressed with apple tv. (Score:5, Insightful)
Like Apple Arcade for the TV. Crappy stuff that Apple thinks is 'Genius' the rest of us are like 'it's crap'. There are a couple of good flicks.. by and large I could skip it.
I gave up on AppleTV+ after my trial due to all the ads in it.
Yes. Ads. On AppleTV+.
No doubt Federighi's "Crack marketing team" (or rather: 'marketing team on crack') would call them 'previews', 'teasers' or 'promos', but I call them what they are: ads - crap I didn't ask or care about, yet I'm stuck dealing with watching/skipping, etc. instead of just watching the show I want to see!
And I won't pay to watch ads!
Re:Have not been impressed with apple tv. (Score:4, Funny)
No doubt Federighi's "Crack marketing team"
I first misread that has Ferengi "Crack marketing team". Somehow it feels kinda correct anyway.
Re: Have not been impressed with apple tv. (Score:1)
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I first misread that has Ferengi "Crack marketing team". Somehow it feels kinda correct anyway.
Too true!
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I'm confued, does Apple do plumbing now?
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Yes, they plumb your wallet's depths. :)
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No doubt Federighi's "Crack marketing team"
I first misread that has Ferengi "Crack marketing team". Somehow it feels kinda correct anyway.
There's no way that they are as greedy and profit grabbing as that... Why do you need to insult the Ferengi?
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You just have to hit skip when it starts if you don't want to see it.
I think OP is complaining (rightly so) about the fact that they have to bother doing that in the first place. I've not tried it yet, but knowing they're already putting ads (oh, excuse me, 'previews') before shows makes it a non-starter for me. (If they're already doing this out of the gates, it'll only get worse from here on out).
Reminds me of the VHS days when I had to fast-forward for 3 mins (ie. skip about 12 mins worth of) a crapload of cross-promotion stuff when my kid wanted to watch Thomas the Tank
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> Reminds me of the VHS days when I had to fast-forward for 3 mins (ie. skip about 12 mins worth of) a crapload of cross-promotion stuff
At least you could do that. Craploads of unskippable stuff is the norm for DVD / Blu-ray.
Wouldn't download a car? I would if the "official" car forced me to sit through irrelevant bollocks before I could use it for its primary purpose.
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At least you could do that. Craploads of unskippable stuff is the norm for DVD / Blu-ray.
Yes, DVDs were the worst - and Disney's were outright rage-inducing - especially their laughable and trademarked FastPlay "technology" - made you think you could just go straight to the content, but all it did was just skip out of the current promo (out of the 15 or so total) onto the next one, with a minimum 3-second processing time in between.
That's pretty much when started torrenting everything my kid wanted to watch and just setup a Plex machine - instant viewing without having to wade through all that
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Re: Have not been impressed with apple tv. (Score:2)
Apple Arcade is awesome. It's perfect for my six year old and way cheaper than a PlayStation or XBox, and I don't have to buy games.
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Think Blind Brand Loyalty. We do!
Re:New slogan for Apple: (Score:4)
On a serious note, I can understand them not including the chargers. Most customers are on their Nth upgrade treadmill cycle and have a box of chargers, and the ones who don't, can afford to cough up the extra $40 entrance fee into the magical Apple ecosystem.
But expecting new customers to buy a $500 phone or tablet as an accessory to their TV? Holy fuck. Is the amount of new customers they're pulling really that small that they don't care? Or do they feel their customers are that dumb and rich?
Waiting for the loyal Apple customer to mod me down. Go ahead and do it, but it won't get you your money back.
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You got it wrong. The TV and the TV Box are accessories to the phone. They make a lot more money off of it.
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But expecting new customers to buy a $500 phone or tablet as an accessory to their TV? Holy fuck. Is the amount of new customers they're pulling really that small that they don't care?
As an accessory to a set-top-box. There are estimated to be only about 23 million Apple TV devices in active use. They could literally provide an iPhone for every single Apple TV that is being actively used, and that would cost them only a month of iPhone sales.
I suspect that approximately no one has ever bought an Apple TV without already owning some other Apple device, so Apple could probably give all 12 affected people an iPhone without it even being a big enough expense to show up on the 10-Q. :-)
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A story about a smallish company I worked for some years back. Their traditional business was failing, and they were trying to reinvent themselves as a "tech company" - but with no expertise and no clue. Their internal systems ran on some godawful DOS software that was so old it had a field to input your "car phone". They had us use it as a ticketing system. The whole thing would crash multiple times a day and halt company's operations for 30 minutes at a time. All employees would submit paper timesheets. T
violation of the Tying Laws (Score:5, Interesting)
violation of the Tying Laws
How long before the EU and USA put some smack down on this?
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Antitrust laws/enforcement are vague and spotty in the US, so Apple probably could drag their feet for a while in the US.
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drag their feet for a while
Forever it seems like.
I have not heard of any monopoly being broken up but the phone company.
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The theory is that if you put enough pressure on them, they'll self-right without an explicit split-up. But that doesn't always work.
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The government doesn't mind large multi-national monopolies, so long as they are OUR large multi-national companies. That's the real reason microsoft was never broken up and Apple, Google and Amazon won't have any concerns at all. Government likes them way to much.
So much easier to keep tabs on us when there are only a handful of big companies.
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There are remedies other than the companies being broken up. Not all that long ago there was an evil company that tried to fix the prices of ebooks. Lets see, what company was that? I think it begins with an 'A' and has something to do with fruit. Anyway, said company was fined and that stupid scheme was disallowed.
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"I have not heard of any monopoly being broken up but the phone company."
In living memory, anyways. There was a right orgy of trust busting around the beginning of the 20th century. Standard Oil, Northern Securities Company, American Tobacco Company...
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Haven't all the bits merged, de-merged, renamed themselves, become subsidiaries, broken away again, remerged, etc., so much that we're back to where we started, only this time there's the pretense things are different?
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It's a nice thought, but technically It's not tying, Because they are allowing you to make the purchase of an Apple TV without purchasing an iPhone, And you don't have to use or purchase any of the iCloud services either - They aren't contractually conditioning the sale of one product upon the sale of another.
Now they may be conditioning the purchase of the online iCloud service upon the use of Apple hardware - an iPhone or Mac, but that seems to make sense as you literally Need an iPhone or Mac comp
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It's a nice thought, but technically It's not tying, Because they are allowing you to make the purchase of an Apple TV without purchasing an iPhone, And you don't have to use or purchase any of the iCloud services either
Yes, you're right. They just sell you a defective product, which isn't necessarily against the law.
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violation of the Tying Laws How long before the EU and USA put some smack down on this?
Not a lawyer, but if you're not either, I still probably know more than you do. I'm American and have lots of friends who are lawyers. I ask them questions and they teach me things.
I don't know anything about these "Tying Laws" you mention. In the USA, requiring one device to have another to update is probably not technically illegal. Why? Well, lots of devices that compete with Apple TV such as Roku and Amazon Fire TV don't have such requirements. A new consumer who might have bought Apple
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I don't know anything about these "Tying Laws" you mention.
Sherman Act, presumably.
In the USA, requiring one device to have another to update is probably not technically illegal. Why? Well, lots of devices that compete with Apple TV such as Roku and Amazon Fire TV don't have such requirements. A new consumer who might have bought Apple TV can now simply go with an alternative.
Right. From an anticompetitive perspective, at least where the general market is concerned, this probably isn't per se illegal, because Apple doesn't control the streaming set-top box market. Frankly, Apple is a relatively minor player in that market, with just somewhere on the order of 2% of the overall market, with Roku having a little over half of the market, Amazon and Samsung having about one sixth each, and everybody else, including Apple, competing for the crumbs.
That is, of
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This is not going to be a problem. The Sherman act applies to abuse of market power and there are multiple simple defences against it. a) Apple has no market power in the TV world. b) Apple isn't applying undue influence on anyone else. c) simple market results will show AppleTV users are most likely overwhelmingly a subset of Apple users so the people affected by this are of such a tiny portion that no market manipulation is taking place.
What you may find here is a fraud claim on the sale. Apple need to m
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I don't know anything about these "Tying Laws" you mention. In the USA, requiring one device to have another to update is probably not technically illegal.
The laws on the books don't specifically address tying.. It is Law set by the courts as interpretation of Antitrust laws.
tying currently is deemed per se illegal under U.S. Supreme Court rulings only if specific conditions are met, including proof that the defendant has market power over the tying product. Further, the Supreme Court has recently recogn
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How long before the EU and USA put some smack down on this?
Long enough that by the time it happens (if indeed it happens at all) it won't matter any more.
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Hard to say in the EU. In the U.S. Apple already bought some smack for the politicians, so never.
Oopsie, well, we fixed it! (Score:5, Funny)
"We fixed the hole in the wall that runs around our garden... whew!
Oh dear (Score:3)
"You have to buy one of our PHONES so you can use one of our TVs." ...IANAL but that sounds like a circumstance that would get a anti-trust lawyer a little bit aroused.
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Why an anti-trust lawyer? Apple doesn't have any market power in the TV space. They are a tiny player, and this change doesn't put any undue influence on the market. In fact it barely has any affect at all given the Venn-diagram of iPhone owners and Apple TV owners.
You may make a claim about fraud if it isn't clear on the box you need an iOS device to set this up, but this is decisively not at all anything to do with anti-trust and if you AAL specialising in anti-trust then you would be a decisively flaccid
Typical Apple (Score:3)
While it's likely to be fixed after this bad press, it's still typical of Apple and is one of the reason why we should never buy or recommend any of their product.
Even if all their products were good today, it doesn't mean it will be the case in 5 or 10 years, and breaking out of the garden will be hard. Vendor lock-in works, unfortunately.
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I'd be interested to read more about it if you have reasonable citations to share.
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Typical as not surprising. In any regular corporation, nobody would have thought on doing something so stupid.
But this is Apple we are talking about. Home of the iMessage, Facetime, the only messaging and video call services ever made to run on devices from a single vendor, by design. Also home of the lightning connector, and the "no sideloading" centralized software repository.
They just pushed their philosophy one step too far this time, but the intent is there since long ago.
PHB thinking: (Score:2)
..."Quarter earnings have slumped, so we're mandated to find new sources of revenue. The Great Spreadsheet shows forcing iPhone sales through TV customers is the quickest route. It's possible it will damage Apple's reputation in the longer run, but I'd rather be canned later than canned now. So TV it is!"
Good! (Score:2)
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I believe you can subscribe to AppleTV on a Roku box - it's officially supported. You can even AirPlay to a Roku box.
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Sue Apple for a free device (Score:3)
Is it stated anywhere in the box, or marketing material, at the original time of purchase, that another Apple device was required to use that AppleTV to its fullest?
If not, I'd ring Tim Cook up and ask "Hey, where's my free device homeboy!"
Re:Sue Apple for a free device (Score:4, Insightful)
I bought a Fitbit years ago. Once you open the box, the setup instructions say "download and install this app onto your phone". Nowhere on the packaging does it say you need a phone.
As it happens, I do own a phone, and I'm not sure how else I expected it to work, but it's really common these days for companies to just blindly assume you have a phone. Bonus points to my country's Covid reporting system which asks for a phone number, with a message to "call [number] if you don't have a phone".
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"Don't you guys have phones?"
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"Don't you guys have phones?"
We probably have, but this doesn't mean we want to fill them with random crap from a random company making appliances.
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If it needs an app to work, I don't buy it. This also has the advantage of saving money.
I agree about the phone-only covid apps. After a while my local government introduced a little card with a QR code on it for people without a smartphone. it took a while, but they got there in the end.
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As it happens, I do own a phone, and I'm not sure how else I expected it to work, but it's really common these days for companies to just blindly assume you have a phone.
Most countries have an expectation based legal system. What would the average person think?. A smartwatch where most features are specifically advertised as something related to the phone? The average person would think a phone is needed. A TV set-top box, not so much.
Incidentally the same applies to Tort law. The average person would walk around expecting to not suddenly slip over. The average person seeing a sign which says "slippery when wet" would assume the floor is slippery which is precisely why prom
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Apple has already acknowledged this as a bug... (Score:5, Informative)
There is really nothing to see here.
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...and is fixing it. There is really nothing to see here.
A testament to the non-existent QA department.
Yet they had $6B+ to spend on their "spaceship" campus that they flaunt in their keynotes at every opportunity.
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Apple QA isn't too bad, especially when compared to Microsoft.
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When you control both the hardware and software you should have better QA than a company that only controls one of those.
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I am always just stunned at how much power Apple has. Seriously, power isn't in the fans, it's in the irrational haters.
A bug in a piece of software is evidence of their non-existent QA department, really?
And you're doing their accounting and watching their keynotes?
How did Apple hurt you?
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A bug in a piece of software is evidence of their non-existent QA department, really?
A good QA person (or, really, any QA person) would've picked up on the dev's arrogant assumption that everyone else also has an iDevice updated with the latest iOS release.
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Bad logic aside, if you follow the thread on Twitter, it appears that no, this is a bug.
It only happens in certain cases where multiple iOS accounts were logged into one device, and one of them has an iOS device and the other doesn't, something like that. Regardless of the exact details, something more reasonable than drawing big conclusions about a lack of a QA department.
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Considering that Apple usually ignores bug reports, the mere existence of an acknowledgement is something to see!
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It's not exactly a small bug. That kind of mistake is worth a mention regardless of any eventual fix.
My and Your Money is bad (Score:2)
The only iteterface to apple i have is a fire tv stick and an older one.
I guess us simpletons on linux are not worthy of buying apple products. Perhaps you need to be a genius working in a bar preying to the great steve jobs and his earthy disciple saint woz.
I am sure thats how economics does not work - the apple car thing will need apple power to work based on there logic.
No i dont think i will buy apple tv
Same thing (Score:2)
I do have some old iPhones sitting around that I could use, but none of them supports iOS 16. I saw on the Twitter thread that someone recommended trying iTunes for Windows to
This is not new (Score:3)
Apple Watch requires an iPhone to setup. You can't even use an iPad, even though an iPad should have all the same functionality as iPhone.
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Apple Watch requires an iPhone to setup. You can't even use an iPad, even though an iPad should have all the same functionality as iPhone.
This one particularly irks me. I don't use my iPhone much as a phone... I could easily get by with an iPad Mini and an Apple Watch, if only Apple would allow it.
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There are versions of the Apple watch already that have the ability to BE a phone.
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And funny enough if you use this requirement the watch and your phone need to have the same service provider. I don't know why but that's listed on the Apple website.
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Because they share the same phone number. That part at least makes sense.
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Apple Watch requires an iPhone to setup
A smartwatch is expected to require a phone for use. The word iPhone appears 19 times on the advertisement page for the Apple Watch. And if you click "buy" you get the following:
Compatibility
As part of our efforts to reach our environmental goals, Apple Watch does not include a power adapter. Please use your existing Apple power adapter or add a new one before you check out.
Apple Watch requires an iPhone 8 or later with iOS 16 or later.
Delivery:
In Stock
Free Shipping
Get delivery dates
Pickup:
Check ava
Obligatory (Score:2)
"Just buy yourself an iPhone"
-Tim Apple
...really? (Score:3)
#AppleSux (Score:1)
So kind! (Score:2)
Fuck the Apple Ecosystem (Score:1)
Seriously.
Shit like this is why I AVOID Apple products.
Solution posted (Score:3)
I always hate to get between slashdot and the anti-apple circle jerk that is happening in the rest of the comments. But the original poster has already posted the solution (as given to him by the apparently non existent and even if they did exist non responsive apple support)
1) log out of icloud on apple tv
2) sign back in to icloud on apple tv
3) accept new T&C on apple tv
Basically turn it off and back on again. One may note the absence of any device but an apple tv in the required steps.
Definitely could use better messaging and fault tolerance.. but the solution is quite simple at the moment.
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I was waiting for this.
You don't have to be an apple zealot or an anti-apple idiot to ask the basic question:
If this is intentional, how much backlash is there?
The answer is: if there's enough for them to lose ONE sale, then you can probably apply halnon's razor.
Yes, they tend to throw their weight around and make weird choices, but they're for-profit, and demonstrably the LEAST evil among the MOST profitable.
For crying out loud people, I had to apply this fix to TEAMs today after upgrading. Workflows brea
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I don't know what to tell you. I've never had to re-enter my icloud password once on my apple tv. Your experience, while certainly frustrating, is definitely not most peoples' experience. If it was then nobody would be buying them.
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Sure I agree it's not most. But if you search for apple tv keeps asking for password you see lots of people with the same issue.
I suspect it's to do with two factor, I've refused to turn it on because I don't have any other apple devices and they don't support standard 2 factor apps.
No waaaaay (Score:2)
Apparently the walled garden includes paying extra money for a bad TV service completely chock full of ads.
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Completely chock full of ads? hah. Not even close. Some shows have skippable previews at the start of them but I've yet to run into anything that gets in the way of me turning on the tv and watching whatever show I want, completely ad-free.
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Completely chock full of ads? hah. Not even close.
.....yet.
But this is Apple - given the look of their AppStore (which is full of ads, btw), it won't take long for TV+ to be full of them too. Because if anyone can make the '20 mins of commercials before the movie starts' the new "normal" for streaming, it's Apple, and I sure AF won't give them money towards that end - you Apple Fanbois free fee to waste your own money instead.
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Since we're just making up stories now.. then I think what will happen is that for every show I download I will get to have lunch with one of the actors once a year.
Hey this is fun. What other stories do you like to make up?
I couldn't really care less what you do with your money. I get a huge amount of value from the apple tv device itself (which doesn't require paying for any apple services if you don't want. I use it to watch many different streaming services. Some of them free) and I also get a ton of
Worst Streaming Service (Score:2)
I hate Apple TV because almost everything requires a secondary subscription. None of those items are marked as "not included" when browsing, so you have to click on them to be told you can't watch them. At a minimum, they should have a browse page that only contains things you can actually watch, and they can promote all their other stuff anywhere else.