Apple has had substantial talks about carrying Major League Baseball games on Apple TV+ next season, The New York Post reports.
Andrew Marchand for The New York Post:
If a deal is finalized, it would represent a significant milestone in sports broadcasting since Apple has long been looked upon as a potential stop for major sports TV rights. One of Apple’s rival companies, Amazon, has already carved out an important piece of real estate in this space, as it will become the exclusive home of NFL “Thursday Night Football” in the fall.
A potential MLB-Apple deal would not be anywhere close to the magnitude of the NFL and Amazon — which is for more than a billion dollars per year — but MLB and Apple would be the entree of the technology behemoth into the coverage of top live sports.
The package MLB has been attempting to sell is weekday national games that ESPN recently relinquished. ESPN will no longer have regular Monday and Wednesday games. The ESPN games were not exclusive in local markets. It is unclear at this point if Apple would be allowed to wall off these select games from regional sports network coverage or not.
Apple would be expected to make the games available through its subscription service, Apple TV+, which is most famous for its series “Ted Lasso.”
MacDailyNews Take: Apple, which already has more money than they know what to do with should shell out for some live sports on Apple TV+! It’d be a genius idea, if we don’t say so ourselves:
Perhaps Cook should consider bidding for and winning NFL Sunday Ticket away from Direct TV, buying rights to Premiere League and La Liga games, etc. and making them Apple TV exclusives. Go directly to the sports leagues with boatloads of cash. — MacDailyNews, May 6, 2014
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Seems like a good idea but this may simply be MLB negotiation tactics. Current carrier is playing hardball (pardon the pun) so MLB puts out a story that Apple is bidding on it. Classic negotiating tactic.
Based on what Apple puts on AppleTV+, they can go after broadcasting the low viewership numbers that attract the high income crowd: Tennis, Golf, maybe some college football, futbol even table tennis or strong man competitions — things like that. Things that they could arguably not raise pricing for or have to charge those viewers a one time fee yet expand the ATV+ offerings.
why bother? Baseballs archaic blackout restrictions don’t make anything like this worthwhile. I don’t have a major league team for hundreds of miles yet even with the MLB package I have a black out of 5 major league teams who consider my area their home area even though several of them are 500 miles or more away.
Blackout lives matter. Even if they live 500 miles away. That’s the crazy whole world we live in now.