“Computer giants Apple are showing interest in joining the billion-pound battle for the next set of live Premier League TV rights when the tender goes out before the end of the season,” Charles Sale reports for The Daily Mail.
“The Premier League is seen as the type of premium content that will help establish Apple TV in the UK and boost iPad sales, while the iTunes subscription service infrastructure is already in place,” Sale reports. “The involvement of Apple – and their great multimedia rivals Google are also expected to make similar soundings – would give the PL a hugely competitive market at a time when the price of other TV sports rights are in decline.”
Sale reports, “The three certain bidders will be Sky, who paid £1.6billion for their current packages, ESPN, who say they are determined to buy more PL content, and Middle East network Al Jezeera [sic], who also have the resources to break the Rupert Murdoch stranglehold on the Premier League.
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
The only reason I have satellite is for soccer, so if Apple gets the rights I can kiss DTV goodbye and go Apple TV all the way!
Highly doubtful.
I was about to ask WTH is a “Premier League” when zmarc answered my question.
No way BSB will lose soccer. It’s a primary way for them to get subscriptions.
Apple would have to put serious money into buying the rights and then selling bucket loads of AppleTVs to consumers.
It really does not seem like Apple’s way.
If this is true, it hasn’t taken long for post Steve Jobs stupidity to appear.
Cook is just f’ng with the Google dorks, forcing them to spend a few extra billion at every auction.
Bullshit. It’s just the League trying to bump up the bidding.
Apple will need content to make their TV successful.
I don’t have cable but I subscribe to Fox Soccer just so I can see the games online. I’m different than most Americans, but most of the world would be interested in soccer from whoever provides it.
If PL were only available from one distributor, then I hope it would be Apple. I prefer avoiding Google as much as possible.
I love the US-centered views on here. Can you people not once look beyond your borders? That missing imagination is what set Jobs apart from most others.
While I doubt the rumour is true, the PL is bigger than American Football & Basketball together – and if it were true then I would be one of many to get it from Apple.
I agree, highly doubtful. If Apple were interested in throwing money at content, why not just buy the media sources here in the U.S. and have multi-year content to push hardware sales? At $100 per Apple TV, they would need to sell 10-million per billion dollars they threw at a single season sports franchise. Doesn’t seem much like Apple.
I don’t think Tim Cook is a foolish man. This rumour is rubbish.
Personally I hope that nobody with any real cash bids, Sky go bankrupt due to paying well over the odds, and the entire bloated house of cards that is the Premier League collapses in on itself taking the corrupt club owners and the WAGS and their faux-celebrity status with it.
I’d love to see real English League football given attention again, tailored for English football fans instead of Chinese betting syndicates. The soul of the game in this country has been destroyed in the quest for Asian TV and merchandising rights. It looks as if another long-standing name, Darlington FC, is about to disappear whilst the Premiership clubs continue to suck in all available cash to pay more bloated wage bills.
If English people really want only 20 clubs in this country, owned, managed, staffed with, and aimed entirely at foreigners then they’re going the right way about it.
So very true. I mourn the loss of the game I loved when I was a child.
All that money spent so that people have something to talk about with their work mates when they go to work.
I just think it’s amazing that a billion pound battle doesn’t somehow involve Steve Ballmer.
You shouldn’t make fun of Ballmer’s weight; he’s probably working on it.
Soccer (or football to the rest of the world- it’s played with the feet) is the ONLY true world language – think about it before you blabber on.
Well to get some perspective Sky built their Empire on the Premiership investment, they were a laughing stock before that.
However due to European rights rules one company cannot own all the rights which is why ESPN are there they bought them when Setanta went broke. So there would be tranches of rights on offer and secondary rights for different media I suspect so a bid for some aspects of whats on offer would be extremely logical for Apples’ content programme, but likely would be in cooperation with another bidder who would have the traditional broadcast rights especially as the European court has decided that exclusive national monopolies are not legal allowing Apple to negociate eurowide right in theory for online streaming.
So yes an interest