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Given the coverage it’s been receiving across the internet — and beyond — across the past few weeks, it’s tough to deny that Apple TV+’s Severance has been one of the buzziest shows of the season, with critics everywhere rushing to declare just how good it is ahead of the debut of the second season on the streaming service. There’s a problem, however; not that many people have actually seen the show, because Apple TV+ is infamously one of the smaller streaming services around. Which raises the question: could Severance be the show that actually changes that?

Apple TV+: How many people are actually watching?

While Apple doesn’t release subscriber numbers for its streaming service, which celebrated its 5th anniversary last year, it was estimated to have around 25 million subscribers globally, which sounds like a lot until you realize that Netflix has almost ten times that number, with Prime Video and Disney+ both reaching well over 100 million subscribers. (Prime is estimated to reach around 200 million, with Disney+ somewhere in the region of 150 million.) With around 25 million, Apple TV+ is out performed by Max, Paramount+, Hulu, and Peacock despite spending somewhere in the region of 20 billion dollars on original content since its inception.

The relatively low subscriber count might also come as a surprise considering that Severance isn’t even the first time the service was home to a show that became a pop culture phenomenon; remember the excitement that surrounded the third season of Ted Lasso when it debuted back in 2023? For awhile, it felt as if everyone was talking about the feel-good soccer comedy, but judging by the size of Apple TV+’s subscriber base, a chunk of people were doing so without actually watching it.

Why aren't people watching Apple TV+?

To be fair, there are significant reasons why Apple TV+ isn’t the monolith on the scale of Netflix or Prime Video — or even Hulu, for that matter. The primary one is likely that Apple TV+ isn’t a home for legacy media; it’s not the place people would go for nostalgia viewing, or even to catch up on movies that were in theaters just a few months earlier. Unlike other streaming services, Apple TV+ has never pretended to be a catch-all for content, and is instead just the home for original content produced for the service, or a small handful of movies that cycle in and out on a monthly basis. The relatively small amount of content available is likely a significant barrier for people wanting the most bang for their buck (It’s $9.99 a month, or $99.99 annually). Additionally, until late last year, the reach of Apple TV+ was somewhat limited, with the service only available on Apple devices and the handful of other devices that were licensed by the company. (It only came to Prime Video as a standalone channel in October 2024, for example.)

The irony is, Apple TV+ has a number of really amazing shows on there, with a higher-than-usual batting average when it comes to new content. The Popverse love for Ted Lasso and For All Mankind is known, but personally, I’ve loved Shrinking, Bad Monkey, Mythic Quest, and a number of other Apple TV+ exclusive shows and movies. (Ask me about Servant one day, for example.) But for a lot of people, these shows just… don’t exist.

Will Apple TV+ ever be a major player in streaming - and should it even try?

Apple has seemingly noticed that it needs to do something to make more people aware of what it’s doing with the streamer. In addition to making it available as a subscription option on other streaming services, Apple TV+ went free for a weekend earlier in January, and the first season of Severance was added to The Roku Channel for a limited time to promote the new season’s debut. Will this be enough? It remains to be seen, but given Apple’s attitude towards the streamer in the past, it’s perhaps worth considering that Apple TV+ is never going to be a massive presence in the streaming world… and that its owners are more than okay with that. Perhaps that should even be its promotional strategy moving forward: quality over quantity, and the place where people can go to discover the next big thing early.

I might be wrong; I hope I am, and Severance’s buzz brings millions to sign up just because they want to see where Lumon Industries goes next. I’m biased, in wanting the Apple TV+ model to succeed, because there’s something admirable about focusing on new shows, new content and trying new things that just relying on what worked in the past, or worse, lowest-common-denominator rip-offs of what works for other people.

Severance is streaming now on Apple TV+, with new episodes every Friday.

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