Jenny Smith / 21 July 2025 / Categories: Arts & Entertainment, Internet, Web Companies

How Do I Cancel My Apple TV Subscription?

Cancelling Apple TV is much easier than cancelling Amazon Prime

If you want to cancel your Apple TV subscription it is much simpler than cancelling Amazon Prime which I signed up for by mistake when purchasing a book by an independent author not available to buy anywhere else. I clicked the wrong button and before I knew it I was an Amazon Prime member. A membership I didn’t want or need. It took me a while to get myself unsubscribed electing to pay the exorbitant shipping charges instead about £7.99. I knew I wouldn’t be shopping on Amazon in the future so preferred the one time fee. Amazon asked me several times if I’d prefer free shipping instead before finally giving up and allowing me to purchase with my shipping charges in place.

Apple don’t make it nearly so difficult. Just navigate to settings on your phone, find your Apple account, I used the search function and then click on your subscriptions. My Apple TV subscription was right there with my renewal date and one click was all it took, Apple TV subscription cancelled.

I read an article in the Telegraph recently waying up the pros and cons of an Amazon Prime account with links through to Amazon (and then the paper getting paid as an affiliate for anyone who clicked through and signed up, yeah you see where I am going, not exactly impartial journalism ) that said 70% of adults in the UK have an Amazon Prime account paying about £95 a year one time fee (£8.99 per month if paid in installments) for the privilege of shopping on Amazon. Staggering really. How one business could manage to get so many people to pay a monthly fee to shop with them on the basis of free overnight shipping, the consequence of which the said 70% instinctively go back to Amazon whenever they need to buy anything keeping all the business in one place.

I don’t have an Amazon Prime subscription. I don’t agree with the alleged labour exploitation and in stark contrast have read about the struggles of Chris Smalls co founder and former president of the labour union ALU Amazon Labour Union in the US set up to begin trying to protect the rights of Amazon workers through the legal channels available.

I resisted a subscription to Apple TV for the same reason, if you are paying you feel obliged to watch the offering, £8.99 per month to have the option or not of watching the programmes on the popular cable network channel sounds like a deal if the content is brilliant.

In the first month of subscribing I watched a few things that I loved, a great series about Supermodels. a drama about the life and rise of Christian Dior, and a few made for Apple TV movies all things proprietary to Apple TV and the subscription felt like great value for money but as the months have passed having spent more time scrolling than actually watching I have found myself not going to Apple TV at all, in the mindset I have exhausted and the offering, what’s up there now stale and picked over like a department store with no fresh stock, you’ve seen it all before so eventually you just stop going in.

However in the case of Apple I was still paying, not watching but paying £8.99 per month.

I’ve allowed this to continue for about 6 months before actually cancelling the subscription. Something I am sure there are millions of customers still doing, paying for something they never actually watching because of FOMO fear of missing out.

Apple TV is a big brand name with loads of marketing hype around it’s programming and big name stars like Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Julianne Moore, making made for TV movies instead of the big budget Hollywood blockbusters of old. Like every business how we all consume movies is very different these days with much more choice.

Another appeal of the Amazon prime subscription it includes the TV subscription as well for Prime members. These guys have got us locked in. I do still pay for Amazon Prime TV £3.99 per month so I admit my principals aren’t so strong when it comes to my TV subscription choices as unfortunately Amazon Prime does have the best selection of movies old and new across the board I have found.

I do think it’s a game of snakes and ladders with Amazon Prime, most of the content I actually want to watch is pay per view, an additional fee on top of the monthly subscription but I have discovered if you wait long enough most of the movies you want to watch will come around to being offered for free anyway.

With TV subscription and pay per view in my experience it’s a game of cat and mouse. Browse a while, search for things you are interested in, don’t purchase, avoid the snakes stay on the ladders and then leave and browse elsewhere. When the algorithm recognises you are not going to watch unless it’s free they’ll give you something you are interested in. They need viewers for their advertisers so if they cannot get you to pay they do want to ultimately keep you on their platform.

It just takes a little patience to beat the house when it’s as massive as Amazon Prime.