“Walt Disney Co.’s sports network ESPN would consider including its WatchESPN application on Apple Inc.’s television device as long as users authenticate they are pay-TV customers, network executive Sean Bratches said,” Andy Fixmer and Alex Sherman report for Bloomberg.
“ESPN subscribers with AppleTV would gain access to the network’s Internet service on their sets. The sports network, which today announced programming for the TV season starting in September, said a deal isn’t imminent,” Fixmer and Sherman report. ““We’re a platform-agnostic content company,” Bratches, the network’s executive vice president of affiliate and advertising sales, said today in an interview. ‘To the extent that in the future there’s an opportunity with Apple to authenticate through the pay-TV food chain as we’re doing with Microsoft, that’s something that we will participate in.'”
Fixmer and Sherman report, “ESPN already provides the app to subscribers with Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox video-game console as part of some pay-TV plans, including those from Verizon Communications Inc.’s FiOS and Comcast Corp.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related article:
Free WatchESPN app streams live ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN3 and ESPNU to your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch – April 7, 2011
dump the six minute commercial breaks and people will just pay for it on tv…at least, I would.
MLBTV on tv is a beautiful thing, $25 bucks a month, every out-of-market game in HD, and NO EFFING COMMERCIALS.
Now if they could just get the same or similar for the NFL, I’d be all over that!
yeah..to me, the ideal application of tv is to cut your cable/dish..and choose al a carte the programming you wish to see, sans advertising. MLB, NFL, Big 12 Sports, NBA, whatever you’re interested in via internet.
I won’t pay a penny as long as blackout can be applied.
It’ll happen eventually I think, this is the new medium..MLB will be the first to embrace it exclusive of contractual agreements with The Dinosaurs Of Madison Avenue and their pimped whores of network and cable television. It just takes time.
Yea, that way you can see all those empty seats at the MLB games in HD with no commercials and no commentary in any way critical of the MLB monopoly.
“..that way you can see all those empty seats at the MLB games..”
you must be a Cleveland fan.
Only I don’t care for out of market games. I want in market games. It’s the only thing holding me back from dumping DirecTV. Have to be able to watch my St. Louis Cardinals on any given night. If I could do that on MLB for $25 a month, DirecTV can have all their thousand other stinking channels.
Just another brick in the wall
Oh please please please please make this happen! This would give me free ESPN in the bedroom where I only get basic cable!
——RM
If you build it, they will come…
…down that is. The cable TV business model is about to crumble, just like what happened to the music industry.
A revolution is coming, and it WILL be televised, whether they want it to be or not!
That’s so jock.
ESPN- a.k.a. Disney, ABC Sports, et.
1- To get cable or satellite in the USA you must pay tribute to Disney’s sports cartel or not get TV. It matters not if you give a shit or not.
2- They took content that used to be well covered on broadcast TV and marched it over to cable with even more commercials and lower quality coverage.
3- Willfully blind of the cheating and corruption in NCAA Football and Basketball. Kirk Herbstreit lives in Columbus and played at Ohio State but didn’t say a peep about the culture of corruption until after it was all over the place.
4- Part of the chorus of SEC fellators that ignore the country’s lowest graduation rate among major conferences- the modern plantation system where winning is the only thing. All Athlete- no student.
5- The primary factor in the ruination of the bowl season of college football into the joke it has become. The sport be damned- we have airtime to fill.
jeez, this must be the End Times, I agree with you on this one.
I’m sure that Apple will offer individual programmes rather than subscribing to an entire channel, just as they insisted on selling individual tracks rather than an entire album.
I can not be the only one who notices a very obnoxious detail:
This is a service available to cable subscribers:
“as long as users authenticate they are pay-TV customers”
So, if I understand this correctly, I can not just ditch the cable, I have to prove (as with TBS/TNT/etc) that I subscribe to a useless cable box? How much sense would that make?
Please let me know that I am wrong with this, and that I can pay them directly, not not have to shell out money to Comecast.