Apple TV continues to clamor for live sports rights packages that nobody is willing to give them.
Apple SVP of Services Eddy Cue joined The Town podcast this week and doubled down on the streamer’s long-held strategy for sports, which looks a whole lot like its incredibly underwhelming Major League Soccer deal.
Emphasizing that Apple TV wants to look at sports rights “a little differently,” Cue explained that the Friday Night Baseball deal with Major League Baseball was a one-off. What Apple wants is to replicate its “end-to-end” approach with MLS.
“MLS is closer to what we wanted to do, which is we’d like to own a sport end-to-end so that we can offer customers what we do today, which is you don’t have to worry about blackouts, you don’t have to worry about how to watch,” Cue said.
From there, Apple believes its broad marketing network and hardware uptake can bring in audiences, and its technological capacity can deliver a better viewing experience than its competitors.
Buying up tiny live sports packages, like Netflix paying for the Home Run Derby or YouTube airing one NFL game this fall, does not fit into Cue’s vision for Apple TV.
“Taking little rights here and there across all these different sports just doesn’t deliver that, and so that’s not an area that we’ve been interested in,” he explained. “I read a lot about us being in the thing, and I get that people say a lot of that, but a lot of that gets used because we’re big and it helps (if it) sounds that (way), but I can tell you we have not been in the bidding process to take chunks of sports.”
Unfortunately for Cue, Apple and American soccer fans, the deal with MLS has largely been a disaster. MLS has moved forward on separate broadcast deals in foreign countries despite Apple’s alleged global reach, while team executives chirp anonymously about how bad the Apple deal is for fans.
Even the most forgiving metrics for MLS viewership on Apple represents a sizable dip from the league’s last season on ESPN, and rough estimates from last year’s MLS Cup Final showed as few as 65,000 people watching the match live on Apple.
Apple is reportedly close on a deal to own F1 rights in the U.S., but that sport is more popular in many other countries. Owning U.S. rights is not exactly end-to-end, either, but at least gets Apple closer.
Cue argued on behalf of Apple’s video quality and one-stop-shop abilities for live sports, but his company simply does not have a track record that its preferred method of airing live sports is working — or that any league wants to do business that way.
About Brendon Kleen
Brendon is a Media Commentary staff writer at Awful Announcing. He has also covered basketball and sports business at Front Office Sports, SB Nation, Uproxx and more.