Apple was, not too surprisingly, one of the first companies to sell digital TV shows en masse. In fact, that’s what the original Apple TV set-top was for: movies and shows you downloaded from iTunes. At first, you had to sync with a nearby computer, but Apple later wised up and made it a standalone device.
Some people continue to resist streaming, since buying from iTunes — now folded into the Apple TV app — means being able to access movies and shows whenever you want them, no subscription needed. If you’re one of those people, or you just like to have perpetual access to favorites, Apple is making some significant upgrades to your library. Here’s what you need to know.
The snail’s crawl to 4K
You may need to be very, very patient
As the header suggests, Apple is finally upgrading purchased TV shows to 4K resolution. That’s right — despite having sold 4K videos since 2017, any show you’ve been watching has been no sharper than 1080p, at best. You’d think it would be natural to upgrade shows to 4K, since movies have been getting the treatment for a decade.
So why the holdup? There’s no official explanation to my knowledge, and there probably won’t be. But there are two factors at work. First, Apple has to coordinate with studios on the matter. They’re probably not going to resist the idea unless they’re trying to sell more 4K Blu-rays, so really, this is just a formality. Purely digital purchases are more profitable for them, since there’s no need to manufacture or distribute anything except cloud infrastructure.
Speaking of that, however, 4K requires a huge leap in storage and bandwidth on Apple’s part. For an example, take the Extended Edition of The Fellowship of the Ring. While real size is going to depend on how and where you watch it, the 1080p version will probably consume no more than 8GB. The 4K release, however, can reach 20GB or more, so it’s not hard to imagine how that would require major datacenter investments Apple would rather put towards Apple Intelligence and Siri AI. With TV shows, the effect is amplified. Star Trek: The Next Generation has 178 episodes, each one over 40 minutes, and that’s a drop in the bucket next to the likes of The Simpsons.
That leads to my first catch with the upgrades, which is that Apple is only rolling them out selectively. You may have to check shows one-by-one to see if 4K is available, and odds are, most of your videos will still be stuck at 1080p. To save you some time, here are the better-known shows that have made the leap as of this writing:
- Mad Men
- Heated Rivalry
- Q: Into the Storm
- RuPaul’s Drag Race (UK)
- Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
- The Twilight Zone (the reboot)
Aside from Mad Men, Heated Rivalry, and perhaps Strange New Worlds, not the most in-demand content. Apple will likely expand its list as datacenter improvements allow.
There’s more, though. Early upgrades appear to be in SDR, not HDR, even when HDR versions exist. If that’s true across the board, it’s an odd decision, considering how much effort has been put into supporting Dolby Vision and HDR10+ on Apple hardware.
Lastly, expect to be streaming 4K in most cases instead of downloading it. This is probably a space-saving restriction, given that a single show season could rapidly fill up some Macs, let alone an iPhone or an iPad. It’s not an option on my Windows PC either. The one exception seems to be the Vision Pro, presumably because it has extremely sharp displays, and needs the freedom to play content anywhere at anytime. You can also get it with up to 1TB of internal storage.
Actually, there is an addendum here. Remember that if you’ve paid for a video from Apple, you don’t own the content forever — only as long as Apple still has distribution rights. So while Apple is unlikely to lose content from, say, Sony or Universal, disputes can and do see titles stripped from people who thought they would have them 10 or 20 years down the road.
