Peter Stern, who oversees Apple's paid subscription services including Apple TV Plus, will depart the company at the end of January.

According to Business Insider, Stern — who operates under the title of VP of services — has told colleagues he wants to spend more time on the East Coast.

Stern was previously a New York-based chief product, people and strategy officer for the erstwhile Time Warner Cable, joining Apple in June 2016 as the cable company was being merged with Charter Communications.

Apple discloses few metrics about its subscription services business, but it does indicate they're currently growing, garnering 5% revenue growth to $19.9 billion for the fiscal quarter ending in September. However, that represented a significant deceleration from the same period between 2021 - 2022, during which revenue grew by 26%.

Stern is credited with getting Apple TV Plus into the sports rights business, leading negotiations with Major League Baseball for Friday Night Baseball, among other endeavors. In addition to Apple TV Plus, Stern helped build Apple subscription products including Arcade, Books, and Apple One, News Plus, Fitness Plus and iCloud Plus.

Stern had also been seen by many to be the heir apparent to Apple services business czar Eddie Cue.

Upon his departure, his oversight will be split into three separate divisions, Business Insider said, with Apple Music chief Oliver Schusser heading one of those units. ■

In 2016, Apple hired the former Time Warner Cable executive to handle cloud-based subscription services. At the time, the Wall Street Journal speculated that in addition to increasing Apple’s investment in Apple Music, Apple Books and iCloud, Stern’s duties would include helping the tech giant tap into the television streaming service industry, which had been on the table for years. 

Stern’s executive vice president-level tenure at a large cable company, where he led product and strategy, made him a perfect candidate to, according to Digiday, bridge a contentious divide that had erupted between various entertainment companies and Apple due to the Cupertino giant’s alleged hard-nosed negotiation tactics. 

Cut to November 2019, when Apple launched Apple TV Plus. The subscription platform, which was originally intended for original content only, has become a formidable player in the streaming wars. Apple TV Plus currently offers 16 original TV series and movies, including Emmy Award-winner “The Morning Show,” “Ted Lasso” and “Greyhound.” (Last spring Apple announced that it would acquire older movies and shows for TV Plus to build a larger catalog of content in an attempt to compete with the massive libraries available on competitive platforms like Netflix, Hulu and Disney Plus.) 

While Apple hasn’t released TV Plus subscriber numbers in its first year, the company’s broader services unit — which houses not only the SVOD platform and the app it runs on, but also things like iCloud and Apple Music — generated $13.2 billion in revenue in the third quarter, up 16%. 

Stern was also behind the 2019 launch of Apple TV Channels, which offers both premium networks like Showtime and Starz, as well as streaming services such as CBS All Access, in a single app and billing system, similar to Amazon Prime Video Channels. Stern said last year that Apple TV Channels is a way to provide subscribers “only the channels you want, on-demand, ad-free, for the entire family, and all of it inside the new Apple TV app.” 

Also in 2019, Stern helped launch Apple News Plus, which gives paying subscribers access to more than 300 magazines, select newspapers and premium digital news services.

An industry source confirmed that former Time Warner Cable exec Peter Stern has been hired by Apple as a vice president with a focus on subscription services.

Apple and Stern did not respond to inquiries on Tuesday about the hire, but The Wall Street Journal was first to report the hiring today, noting that Stern will report to Eddy Cue, the company’s SVP of Internet software and services, who has reportedly been trying to secure deals with programmers for a pay TV service but his brash negotiation style did not play well with broadcasters and other programmers, per an earlier report from the WSJ.

Apple also confirmed to the paper that Stern will be focused on cloud services and subscription services such as Apple Music and a potential (and long-rumored) streaming TV service.

Stern, who joined TWC in 2004, most recently served as the MSO’s EVP and chief product, people and strategy officer. Stern was also an important player there amid the emergence of authenticated TV Everywhere services, an inititiative embraced eagerly by TWC, which extended support to wide range of connected platforms, including Roku devices, the Xbox 360 and Xbox One and Samsung smart TVs. He departed following Charter Communication’s acquisition of TWC earlier this year.

The WSJ said Stern was part of a team that discussed a deal with Apple about delivering the MSO’s video service on an Apple TV device. A source with knowledge of those negotiations said Apple was viewed as arrogant by TWC and that it “wanted too much” amid promises that affixing the MSO’s service to the Apple brand would be more than enough to help the MSO reverse mounting video subscriber losses.

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The WSJ suggested that Stern’s knowledge and understanding of the pay TV industry and its business models (something that Apple has struggled with) could help Apple rekindle its pay TV plans.