Bloomberg’s Jon Erlichman explains how Apple TV found its way into providing NCAA Tournament coverage through a deal with the ACC Conference on Bloomberg Television’s “Market Makers.”
The ACC Conference, one of the big ones [Syracuse, North Carolina, Virginia, Duke, etc.], has its own digital network and they are making that available as an app on Apple TV. You know, Steve Jobs was passionate about music, you’ve got Tim Cook and Eddy Cue, who’s the point person on a lot of the Apple TV activity, who are passionate about Duke basketball. Duke is part of the ACC and, since a lot of those broadcasting rights are not going to be available in sports for a long time, the alternative is to do something like this, where you can have access to content while people are enjoying March Madness; it’s news and highlights and that kind of stuff which they can very easily get because the conferences themselves are really pushing their own content, too… If [Apple] can start to get access to more sports, then really they start to rattle the cable cage. – Jon Erlichman
Direct link to video here.
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CBS and Turner Sports app to stream March Madness games to iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch over WiFi and 3G – March 4, 2011