What happens to Apple TV accounts when the owner dies

No. Apple's iCloud Terms, Section IV.D, state that the Account is non-transferable and that any rights to the Account or Content within it terminate on death. Movies and TV shows bought in the Apple TV app or iTunes sit inside that account. Apple publishes no estate exception for purchased media, and its published list of what a Legacy Contact can access expressly excludes "Purchased content, such as movies, music, and books." Note where the death provision lives: it is in the iCloud Terms. The Apple Media Services Terms that govern the Apple TV app contain no death or survivorship clause at all.

No. A Legacy Contact can reach data the account holder stored in iCloud and in an iCloud Backup, but Apple's published list of what a Legacy Contact cannot access has four entries, and the first is "Purchased content, such as movies, music, and books." The other three are subscriptions and in-app purchases, payment information for Apple Account or Apple Pay, and information stored in iCloud Keychain. So a Legacy Contact does not receive the Apple TV library or the Apple TV subscription; cancelling the subscription is still what stops the billing. Apple states that Legacy Contact access to the account's data runs three years from when Apple approves the first Legacy Contact account request, after which the account is permanently deleted. For full account recovery, see the Apple Account estate guide at /digital-assets/apple/.

Yes, and this is worth knowing before an estate inventory is compared against the library. The Apple Media Services Terms state that "Content may not be available for Redownload if that Content is no longer offered on our Services," and that content "also may be removed from our Services at any time (for instance, because Apple loses its right from the Content provider to make it available), after which it cannot be downloaded, redownloaded, or otherwise accessed from Apple." A movie or show recorded as purchased can be missing even inside the original account, so a purchased Apple TV library is not a permanent holding.

Start with who is billing it. Apple directs subscriptions paid through Google Play to the Apple TV app on an Android device or play.google.com, and subscriptions paid through Amazon to Amazon; Apple also notes that cancellation works slightly differently in Israel and South Africa. Where Apple is the billing channel, Apple states that "You can't cancel a family member's subscription," so an executor who is not signed in to the deceased's own account raises the cancellation with Apple Support, which Apple states requires and verifies legal documentation, generally including a death certificate, before assisting with a deceased person's account. Do not try to reset or guess the deceased's Apple Account password. The subscription continues to auto-renew and charge the payment method on file until it is cancelled, so the charge runs while the request is pending.

Apple states that "For security reasons, Apple requires and verifies legal documentation before we can assist with a deceased person's account. This generally includes a death certificate, and might also require a court order or other documentation," and that documentation requirements might vary by country or region. Where the deceased designated a Legacy Contact, that contact requests access with the access key plus the death certificate. Where there is no access key, Apple states that "In the U.S., Israel, and other locales, you can request access to a deceased person's Apple Account with a court order" that names the requester as the rightful inheritor of the deceased's personal information, and that "Only one person can request access to a deceased person's Apple Account." Apple reviews each request and decides at its discretion.