Sports Streams
6/20/2023
It seems clear that Apple is determined to make its way into the world of sports. Around this time last year, the tech giant announced that its streaming platform, Apple TV, had acquired all global rights to the Major League Soccer (MLS) events – at least for the next 10 years. Apple agreed to pay $2.5 billion over the course of the agreement ($250 million per year), an offer that beat several other interested companies, including Amazon, Warner Bros., and Discovery.
With this deal, viewers can watch all MLS soccer matches via the app’s new subscription-based live streaming service and enjoy a few other features like on-demand content, highlights, game analysis and replays, behind-the-scenes footage of players and clubs, and most importantly, eliminate the local blackouts. This subscription is complementary to those soccer fans that hold season tickets to any MLS club.
In another sports venture, Apple and the Major League Baseball (MLB) have established a partnership to stream “Friday Night Baseball,” a weekly doubleheader on Apple TV+ available to subscribers in 8 countries. Streaming Apple TV+ costs $6.99 per month and includes live pre and postgame shows, MLB game replays, news and analysis, highlights, classic games, and a full complement of on-demand programming.
Back in September 2022, Apple and the National Football League (NFL) announced that Apple Music would be the newest and sole sponsor of the Super Bowl Halftime Show – a title previously held by Pepsi for many shows past. It was reported that Apple agreed to pay $50 million annually for the next 5 years to replace Pepsi’s logo with the iconic half-bitten apple. According to a study released by Relo Metrics, Apple received a total of 177 seconds of screen time during this year’s Halftime Show in February. Assuming the figure is right, that equates to a cost per second of over $282k!
Much like the MLS deal made, Apple was in talks with the NFL to secure control of the NFL’s Sunday Ticket video rights beginning next season. Despite being considered the leading candidate to win for months, Apple decided to back out of the bidding war, leaving Alphabet and Amazon to work through the negotiations. Google now has a 7-year contract for which it paid around $2 billion, leaving Amazon with the rights to Thursday’s football games.
It looks to me that streaming services are starting to feel the pressure of providing sports content on their platforms, and Apple is not the exception. Whilst other companies still retain most of the sporting events industry content (ESPN leading this sector), more and more streaming corporations and giant techs are looking to expand their services for their viewers – at an additional fractional cost of course. For those sports-watching lovers out there, I hope you are prepared to engage yourselves with all the streaming providers, so you don’t miss a single event. It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of where to watch which sport!
Nirvanna Silva