What Drove the Most Apple TV Signups in 2025?
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Apple TV may not be everyone’s first choice among streaming services, but it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t produce some compelling shows. After all, nearly everything on Apple TV is an “Apple Original,” and the company is pouring substantial amounts of money into producing great stories.
Those efforts have also paid off. Apple became the first streaming service to ever win an Academy Award for Best Picture, and it’s broken records for Emmy nominations and awards on more than one occasion. While its early shows like The Morning Show and For All Mankind were compelling in their own right, they’ve been eclipsed by later releases like Ted Lasso, Slow Horses, The Studio, and Severance, and if the latest original series, Pluribus, is any measurement, there’s no reason to believe that Apple is slowing down.
With such a great collection of original shows, you might think these are pulling in record subscribers, but it seems most of these haven’t even cracked the top ten. In fact, it’s not even Apple’s originals that have attracted the most signups overall — it turns out it’s actually Friday Night Baseball that’s getting people to pull the trigger.
It’s All About Live Sports
According to industry research from Antenna, only four Apple Originals contributed to signups, and the best of these — The Morning Show lagged behind three different MLB games.
Number one was the Friday night Dodgers vs. Yankees game in May, which drew the attention of over 722,000 new signups. Yankees vs. Phillies in July gave up 698K, and Phillies vs. Mets in June was in third place at 631K.
These were followed by The Morning Show in a somewhat distant fourth place at 524K, where it was only slightly ahead of Apple’s new Jon Hamm series, Your Friends & Neighbours at 514K. Stick and Chief of War made the bottom half of the top ten, interspersed with three other MLB games.
It’s worth noting that Antenna only analyzed data between April 2025 and September 2025 — the MLB season — since the goal of the report was to assess the state of sports streaming subscriptions. That means it wouldn’t have captured the number of signups for shows like Severance, which ended its second season in February. However, The Studio streamed most of its episodes in April and May, so its absence is a bit conspicuous considering it set a new record for the most Emmy Award nominations and wins by a freshman comedy series. It also won Outstanding Comedy Series — a rare second win after Ted Lasso claimed the same award in 2021.
Antenna’s analytics excludes those on “broad intra-company bundles,” which effectively rules out Apple One subscribers. However, it does include free trials. This suggests that a large number of users are signing up specifically for a game — perhaps via a 7-day trial — and then leaving shortly after.
Notably, this also means that many of these wouldn’t have been the same subscribers who returned for subsequent games. Viewers watching the June games would be an almost entirely different group of people from those who watched in May.
Since Antenna only tracks when a user first joins, anyone who came on board in May — whether they stayed subscribed or converted from a trial — would not be counted in the June figures. Therefore, the 631,000+ signups for the June Phillies vs. Mets game were almost entirely new customers, separate from the 722,000 who joined for the Dodgers vs. Yankees in May.
Still, these numbers come with an important caveat. As you can probably imagine, sports fans that are inspired to sign up because their favorite team is playing in a Friday Night Baseball double header aren’t necessarily going to stick around — and Antenna’s data reflects this.
When focusing on retention, the baseball games were at the bottom of the top 10 by titles viewed. At the top were the series Murderbot and Smoke as well as an Apple Original Film, Fountain of Youth. In short, those who signed up to watch TV shows or movies were more likely to stick around than those who came strictly for the sports.
That’s probably not too surprising, considering the dearth of sports on Apple TV during that time period, but it could also go a long way to explain why Apple is getting rid of its separate paywall and bringing MLS content to all Apple TV subscribers — and why its new F1 deal is doing the same right from the starting grid.
