Delete TV App Downloads on Mac

A single HD movie download in the Apple TV app runs several gigabytes, and 4K runs far past that. Download a season for a flight, forget about it, and your Mac quietly carries it for months. Here's how to remove TV app downloads, keep watched episodes from piling up, and confirm the space actually came back.

Remove downloads in the TV app

1. Open the TV app and click Library in the sidebar.
2. Click Downloaded to see only what's stored on this Mac.
3. Hover over a movie or episode, click the ⋯ (More) button, and choose Remove Download. Right-clicking the item gets you the same menu.
4. For TV shows, open the show to remove individual episodes, or remove a whole season at once from its ⋯ menu.

Removing a download doesn't remove anything from your library. Purchases stay attached to your account forever — the cloud icon re-downloads them any time, and that goes for Family Sharing purchases from other family members too. The one exception is rentals: a rental is tied to its rental window, so don't delete one you haven't watched yet.

The Downloaded view also shows everything at a glance, so it doubles as an audit — sort through it once and you'll usually find one forgotten season doing most of the damage. And note that files you've imported into the TV app yourself, like home videos, play by different rules: the store can re-issue purchases, but nobody re-issues your home videos. Make sure a copy exists somewhere else before removing those.

Let the app clean up after itself

1. In the TV app, choose TV → Settings from the menu bar (or press Cmd+,).
2. In the General tab, turn on Automatically delete watched movies and TV shows.

With that enabled, a finished episode doesn't linger — its download is removed after you've watched it, which is what you wanted anyway. To go back to keeping everything, untick the same box. This is also the first thing to check if downloads keep vanishing and you don't want them to — episodes disappearing right after you watch them means this box is ticked.

Worth knowing: unlike Podcasts, the TV app doesn't download new episodes on its own. Downloads only happen when you click the download arrow, so the cleanup setting above is the only automation you need — there's no hidden auto-download to hunt for.

Verify the space came back

The TV app stores its media inside your Movies folder by default — confirm the exact location under TV → Settings → Files, which also lets you move the library somewhere else, like an external drive. To measure what it's holding right now:

# size of the TV app's local library (read-only)
du -sh ~/Movies/TV

Run it before and after removing downloads to see the difference. And delete through the app, not by dragging files out of that folder in Finder — the TV app tracks media in a database, and pulling files out from under it leaves ghost entries that still claim to be downloaded.

If the Storage pane in System Settings still shows a big TV chunk right after cleanup, give it a minute — the categories recalculate lazily — or close and reopen the window.

Longer term, downloads earn their space on flights and hotel Wi-Fi; at home on a decent connection, streaming costs you nothing in storage. If you find yourself clearing this folder every month, the fix is downloading less, not cleaning more.

Do the same sweep in Podcasts

Podcasts is worse than the TV app: it downloads new episodes automatically and keeps them by default. See deleting podcast downloads on Mac for the same treatment there.