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Apple 'Ready to Spend Billions' on Live Sports Content Over Next Four Years
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I live in football broadcast hell. My favorite team is the Chiefs, has been since I was a kid. I live near the edge of that market and can't get a DTV signal to my house, even with one of those crazy Leaf antennas. The Chiefs are popular so they're often on primetime across a variety of networks such as CBS, NBC, ESPN, and sometimes FOX. The streaming services I've tried blackout my local games. Otherwise I have to buy a ton of separate streaming services just to watch a game on each network each week. It's a huge pain in my ass and it's unmanageable. So I end up watching a bunch of bootleg streams online. Would love it if Apple offered me a solution that doesn't suck an entire butt. However, I don't trust the NFL to ever agree to such terms.
Likeliest option would be them buying a streaming service like DAZN and instantly acquiring all of their rights. Might not mean much the US but Canada, Spain, Italy, Japan lots of key rights. Having worked in Sports TV this is something we've all seen coming for years, big players in sports broadcasting are going to be Apple, Facebook and Amazon. Not the broadcasters you would expect.
100M watched the LAST episode of a great TV show. Every single year 100M people watch the last episode of the NFL season (the Super Bowl). And that's just in America. It's over 150M world-wide.
And that pales in comparison to the FIFA World Cup - which had 1.1 billion people worldwide watching the 2018 World Cup.
Neilson Ratings don't just count when people watch things live, but also when they stream them.
Also, more and more people are not watching sports live - instead choosing to watch game recaps on their phone.
Sport is valuable as it's the ONLY thing that people do still watch live, and for advertisers that's still huge.
Because the title said sports. There are loads of sports in the world.
And lots of people actually quoted and agreed with me so clearly people do care.
Not everyone lives in the state of the team they root for. That is literally the reason it exists. People move for work, family, etc. It's a large enough group of people that Sunday Ticket was born.
True, though I think the legacy networks don’t have as good of programming as they used to. I can’t remember the last time I watched network television for anything other than sports or maybe an awards show or a program like 60 minutes.
Exactly, like all the snowbirds who flock to Florida but for some reason want to watch the Giants or the Jets! If they didn't they'd get stuck with the Jags or Fins. If they are lucky they'd get the Super Bowl Champs, Bucs!!! But Sunday Ticket, as Matt said is to watch all out of market games. That is how all the major league sports packages work....to watch the out of market teams.
NFL has some fans outside the US but nothing to spend money on. Football, you call it soccer, on the other hand is not counting there viewers in millions, but billions. A football channel with Liga A, la Liga, Bundesliga and Premiere league (maybe Brasil and Portugal) would have a Billion viewers from the get go.
NFL is a bit like Baseballs "world series", it is big but no one in the world knows about it.And the world is really big. The US is contributing a mere 5% of the population.
The money is elsewhere.
You realize that Apple is operating worldwide? 0.4Million viewers in the US is to 120 Million for a ManU match or 1,8Billion (thats 1800 Million) viewers over a premiere league weekend worldwide nothing to worry about.
The US alone represents a tiny fraction of the money to be made with big sports events. Right now it is a rights problem, every European country got there own rights, Africa is devided into 4 right zones, Asia is a checkerboard, China alone gets viewer numbers for a game that outstrips the US population.
Football (soccer) got 4 Billion followers wordwide. Now, think like $1 from every one per month for premium access. One lousy dollar. Thats 40 billion a year. Now think, that not everyone will subscribe, but only a quarter and its included in the 5 bucks Apple TV+. Thats 50Billion a year.
All major leagues together cost about 20 Billion a year right now, the premiere league with over 4 Billion being the most expensive.
You do the math.
is it specifically about American sports? I don’t think so. So arrogant.
Stop chuntering. American football viewers pale into insignificance with most other popular sports worldwide, have a little look at the type of worldwide audience the English premier league games can hold - let alone a FIFA World Cup. Apple has a world wide user base. It’s completely irrelevant that they’re a US company. It’s true. No one cares. So stop.
Not in this country, and Apple isn’t going to be buying global TV rights.
Premier League and Liga MX max out around 1 million viewers in this country.
It’s partly why soccer rights are being bought up by everyone. It’s affordable.
60 Minutes is a good example of how the entertainment landscape has changed. Although still typically a top 10 or 15 network show, 60 Minutes' average viewers/ratings are nothing like they used to be when options were much more limited.
There are just way too many choices out there today for even top level shows to see that kinds of television ratings that were around decades ago. Take away the hundreds of cable channels, the streaming services, the internet. YouTube, etc. and today's network shows would be doing much better.
‘This country’ is not a concept that Apple can possibly work with. When you sell over a billion handsets, even a layman can see that it far exceeds the boundaries of a single country. Yet everyone here is obsessed by what America wants. Apple may be a US company - but it’s far from a solely American audience.
really? Superbowl had 100 million viewers,not all watch the whole game, some only the half time show but still, a massive amount of viewers. An average NFL game get less the 20 million viewers.
Table tennis champion game was watched bei 220 million viewers.
Just saying.
A country like India with 4 times the population of the US that puts cricket close to god status, btw Australia, Pakistan, the UK and others do the same, outstrips the NFL several times. It is very very localised, only in the US (all attempts to bring it outside have failed) and the US is tiny in comparison.
90% of hollywood movies flop one after another. Footdull? Then again, stadium chants are more fun than the product itself these days.
You mean the US? Thats hardly important. Apple is not making there money in the US. And why not buying global rights? It´s a small world so why not buy one of the big sports? Completely? Like Soccer would be about 20 Billion. It is the dominant sport on the planet. By far. Followed by Cricket, WAY cheaper then soccer, global rights would be closer to 6 Billion.
Number 3 is more expensive because lots happens in the US and the wages are obsene, so are the rights.
Everything down the list gets cheaper then a billion per year except Number 9, few followers but ridiculous prices, localized and doing there own thing.
- 1. Soccer / Association Football – 3.5 Billion Followers
- 2. Cricket – 2.5 Billion Followers
- 3. Basketball – 2.2 Billion Followers
- 4. Hockey – 2 Billion Followers
- 5. Tennis – 1 Billion Followers
- 6. Volleyball – 900 Million Followers
- 7. Table Tennis – 850 Million Followers
- 8. Baseball – 500 Million Followers
- 9. Rugby – 410 Million Followers
- 9. American Football – 410 Million Followers
- 10. Golf – 390 M
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I hear you, we tried watching legally, but that does not work, so we look for other sources.
M:B pundits are tired of the blackout laws since they don't make sense and are unprofitable.
When it comes to tv streaming rights, “this country” is absolutely the correct scope.
If Apple bought Disney and ESPN became a part of Apple TV+, cable would be doomed and ATV+ would boom, even if it doubled in price. I’m here for this.I highly recommend that anyone interested in this topic listen to The Dan Le Batard Show from this Tuesday, hour 1. It features John Skipper (former ESPN chief) and David Samson (former baseball executive). They go in depth on the financials of what Apple is trying to accomplish and discuss the probability of Apple purchasing Disney in its entirety or part of the company in order to obtain the sports rights ESPN currently has.
The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz
Sports Podcast · Updated Daily · From the Elser Hotel in Downtown Miami, Dan Le Batard, Stugotz and company share their unique perspectives on all-things sports, pop-culture and more. This is the place for original content from Le Ba…podcasts.apple.com
Not enough. Buy the rights to all major soccer leagues, the champions league, the continental cups and the 2026 World Cup in the US, Mexico, and Canada. Become the home of world class professional soccer … in 4k.
I suspect what it really is about is little Timmy trying to alter the mindset of humans, and indoctrinate them into the c*ncel c*lture way of thinking. If you look at the current Apple TV+ content, it is chock full of this mentality, and thus has failed to attract the average Joe's and Jane's. So Timmy's insidious plan might be to buy up the sports rights, replace the commentators with his own people, and remove all the elements of what he considers to be t*xic, shifting the mind set of the Joe's and Jane's in one big fell swoop. If done right, it's actually genius. It could backfire massively though.
If that is his plan, it's a damn shame that he isn't actually a decent human, his overarching mentality of "doing the right thing" as long as it doesn't effect my profits, is sickening, and is the downfall of current western society.