Finally! I don't care if it's apple or someone else, but the "no blackouts" thing is big. Nothing drives me more crazy than being unable to stream a game because I happen to live in the same geographic region as the team home field. This would finally motivate me to cancel the cable TV subscription - the only sport I watch is soccer, and the only reason I keep the cable TV is so I can dig out the remote whenever the dumb blackout rules prevent me from watching it via streaming.
It is really annoying that MLB.TV has gone the route with games on other providers. I don't want to create another account or install some other app on my TV or phone for a few games a season. At least the radio broadcasts still work on mlb.com when it happens.
> This would finally motivate me to cancel the cable TV subscription
Which is exactly why blackouts exist. Live tv is pretty much solely about sports and 24 hour news channels now. The big four sports leagues all make billions a year off their TV deals. Giving up blackouts would absolutely hamstring them.
Hard to believe the other leagues will give up blackouts until they are confident they can run their own streaming service and cash in on that micro gambling revenue. Can you imagine how much money the NFL would make if people were gambling $.10-1 on every play?
As I understand it, blackouts primarily exist to ensure local ticket sales for full stadiums.
"In most cases, the blackout results when a sports league prohibits an event from being televised locally if the event did not sell out all its tickets."
So I think we're referring to different blackouts. I believe OP was complaining that streaming services such as NBA league pass never show your local team. If you want to watch your team you need a cable subscription. That's different than your local TV station not showing the game because it didn't sell out.
Leagues, like the NBA and MLB, sell in-market broadcast rights to regional sports networks (an RSN), which gives the RSN exclusive rights to broadcast that game to in-market users. These RSNs typically only show their broadcast through cable packages, which is why local users would need to subscribe to cable packages that carry the RSN that holds the rights to their local team. However, some RSNs (at least in baseball) are starting to build direct to consumer streaming products. NESN, the RSN that carries the Boston Red Sox, has come out with NESN 360 which allows users to stream Red Sox games without a cable package at a price point of $30/month [1].
Leagues retain out-of-market broadcast rights and serve those to out of market users through their streaming platforms like MLB.tv and NBA League Pass.
Live sports is the only reason tons of people pay $80+ a month for cable. The majority of my close friends have a cable subscription solely to watch basketball and monday night football. If those people could switch to streaming services to see their team cable would be even more fucked than they already are, so broadcast rights with blackouts are worth billions. The leagues don't think they'd be able to make that up with increased streaming revenue.
These days blackouts on streaming services are due to exclusive broadcast rights on local networks. Teams aren't (usually) dumb enough to black out the entire region because of bad ticket sales. They learned that it creates a negative feedback loop that kills the local fan base, the Chicago Blackhawks are a good case study.
Yes. And that used to be a worthwhile effort. However, given all the choices consumers have today it's saying "go away. We don't want you." The MLB can't afford to lose more top of mind market share, especially to the younger audience.
> the dumb blackout rules prevent me from watching it via streaming
The blackout MLS rules are really dumb. For example, I het my normal TV through DirecTV stream. My local MLS club (FC Cincinnati) airs their local broadcast on a local over the air channel. This channel is also on my DirecTV subscription.
However, because I get my “TV” streamed over the internet and not through a satellite dish or cable, all local MLS games were blacked out for me. I pay for local TV access, but even when the game was broadcast over the air, I would get blacked out because of how I got the TV access.
This was just dumb.
I specifically got a network OTA tuner just for this purpose, but getting rid of blackout rules entirely would be fantastic.
MLB next, please. I don't have cable, which means I just don't watch baseball right now. I would 100% sign up for MLB.tv if I could watch my two favorite teams play.
I don't watch baseball, but I always assumed MLB.tv and NHL.tv used the same technology.
The way NHL.tv used to work, the blackout check would be done when you opened the stream. So you could connect to a VPN in, say, Germany, start the stream, then disconnect the VPN and after a brief interruption the playback would continue. If you did the VPN connection from your router you could stream from any device, too.
Funny thing, the ads always seemed to know exactly what market you were in.
Yep. Fortunately I don't live in the same state as my baseball team anymore. So I watch just about all their games through MLB.tv. Would be so frustrating if I lived near my team though.
For the Blue Jays, the blackout applies to the entire country.
And there are certain geographic badluck regions in the US where one can get blacked out from several teams despite not being close to them. Especially when it's a national broadcast [1]
Also, the marketing at MLB used to be really bad a few years ago -- it seemed to be deliberately targeting home team fans and leaving out the fact that they would not be able to watch their home team.
"Currently, six MLB teams are blacked out all across Iowa: the Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals, Chicago White Sox, Minnesota Twins, Kansas City Royals and Milwaukee Brewers. Those teams are not available to watch with an MLB.tv subscription or when they are often aired on national broadcasts. Some of those clubs are not available on Iowa’s main cable packages either."
"Additionally, some parts of Iowa are more than 500 miles from several of those blacked-out MLB teams."
Things get pretty hilarious when you live in a city with two sports teams and they happen to be playing each other. Every year, Cubs/Sox Crosstown Classic for example.
> I always thought that was silly. Games sell out, that doesn’t mean local fans still don’t want to watch.
Do they still do blackouts if the game sells out? I'm not a sports fan, but I thought games would only get blacked out if they didn't sell enough in-person tickets.
The local/in-market rights are sold independent of out of market rights. The local rights are held by channels typically part of Cable TV, that is why there is blackouts the streaming app usually won't have rights to show you the game in that region, the cable channels do, those channels(RSNs) pay more because they focus more on 1-2 regions and also this is primary reason those packages sell so they cannot afford not to loose the deal, the streaming apps have a lot of regions to cover nationally and other usage drivers so will not be able to pay same price.
The kind of blackouts you describe is still common in U.K. to encourage you to go and support the local team rather than the big regional team because that is on TV. Think Wigan Athletic or Bolton Wanderers instead of Manchester United
English football has 11-21 tiers and strong grassroots. Those blackouts are not designed for big teams to sell tickets they will anyway sell out, but to help the smaller teams which are rarely featured on TV, not in the top premier league but play instead in Championship, league 1,2, or non conference leagues etc.
Not sure on that. I just remember living about a mile from a large college stadium that always sells out. I tried to watch the game on TV and got denied. This was a while back, I'm not a huge sports fan, but that stuck with me and made me not want to bother trying to watch any future games.
The fact that the game is local, makes it more interesting to me to watch on TV. I'm not a big sports fan, I am highly unlikely to ever go to a game... but they might get my viewership on a live stream, just to see what's going on near by, or to have a get together at my house and have a game on.
But my experience pretty much mirrors yours. Any time I might be interested in seeing a game, it's been blacked out on TV. So I never bothered to watch anything else. Why would I give a shit about a team not even near me if I'm not a huge fan to begin with?
The game-changer for them, IMO, is to buy the rights to broadcast Pac-12 and Big-10 football (and ideally all sports).
I am an avid college football fan. Trying to find games to watch is a pain without some sort of lame ass subscription somewhere. I already pay for Apple TV + because it's bundled with other services that I use.
With the incoming threat of ESPN + Disney + SEC fracturing the college football landscape, Apple could provide the money, reach, and power to take some of the sport (and country's) biggest brands and put them front and center in front of millions and basically compete head-on with Disney. Next step is you broadcast all of the NCAA sports - baseball and volleyball championships, etc. Take what the Big-10 and Pac-12 channels were supposed to be and make them great and unbundled from cable TV.
In the coming years I think they're going to add live news with a focus on "quality journalism" as well. The Jon Stewart show and documentaries they are producing are the first drip.
Why would they not even just have them available for PPV. I should be able to pay to see whichever football game! It doesn't need to be this crazy game of blackouts and satellite subscriptions!
Even if Apple just carried all Pac-12 network football games, that would really move the needle. The Pac-12 network is pretty much impossible to get through traditional cable providers outside of the west coast.
I doubt either of those conferences would want to be stuck behind a paywall that is neither on terrestrial television or cable networks. Dealing with ESPN is dealing with ABC, which is a gigantic advantage. The SEC remains the power conference of power conferences, and whatever they decide is ultimately the way college football will trend. Their recent agreements with Oklahoma and the University of Texas are just a start into deraveling the top tier athletic institutions from other conferences.
> The SEC remains the power conference of power conferences, and whatever they decide is ultimately the way college football will trend.
Not so fast my friend! :p
The Big Ten in particular is a peer with the SEC in football viewership and revenue, but dwarfs the SEC in overall academic revenue and power. Texas and Oklahoma’s move to the SEC is a big deal, but these seismic shifts cause other seismic shifts and conferences such as the PAC-12 will look to form deeper relationships with the Big Ten so that they are not at a permanent disadvantage. The Big Ten itself continues to eye schools such as Duke, North Carolina, Virginia, and Virginia Tech as potential new members. This isn’t the end of the story there.
In addition, money from a company such as Apple gives them a significant bulwark against the SEC dictating how football goes. You may recall the Big Ten, ACC, and PAC-12 formed a scheduling “alliance” in response to Texas and Oklahoma moving to the SEC. It may end up being a pony show, but the intent is there. Apple perhaps purchasing the rights to stream the games may not necessarily preclude local broadcasts either. Otherwise you’d make the exact same argument about ESPN and the SEC. But SEC games are routinely broadcast on other networks.
Now, that’s not to say with recent NIL deals and Texas and Oklahoma moving to the SEC that something seismic won’t occur. But I think what is more likely to happen is a separate league separate from any conference in football only which would include top tier brand name programs, versus a world where the SEC and ESPN dictates how things go. I do think ESPN’s likely long-term goal is to break off the marquee SEC programs (Alabama, LSU, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, etc.) alongside the marquee other conference programs (Ohio State, Notre Dame, Michigan, Penn St, Oregon, USC, etc.) and form a league, but so long as the other conferences don’t care for it, the risk of losing billions in academic funding (which makes football revenue look like a lemonade stand) will keep this from happening.
Well, it's sorta my point that the inevitable direction of college sports is a consolidation of power schools into a federation where they can manage their own interests without worrying about arbitrary NCAA limitations, and it's likely to include more than just the FBS. UNC, Kansas, Duke, and Clemson are likely the next schools to make moves.
I'm really curious as to what Apple's broader strategy is with live sports, since that's typically been one of the last big reasons to keep a cable subscription. However, given that Apple TV Plus is going to have at least some MLB games[1] and is rumored to possibly be the new home for the NFL Sunday Ticket[2], they could be seeking to make it the must-have subscription for fans of live sports.
There is a lot i don't understand about how they view things in Cupertino.
I mean, there must be a lot of people at Apple thinking about the future - what it will look like, how media is consumed and then again how Apple can own that pipeline and ecosystem.
Both on the media side, hardware side and software side the offering is lacking in ways i find very strange coming from Apple.
For instance why haven't Apple just gotten the internet broadcast rights to a lot of sports to build a moat around it - not because it is popular but because they can. With Apples finances they could also get alot of popular sports on Apple TV as well.
Why didn't Apple buy any movie studios to kickstart Apple TV and get a big catalogue from the get go - seems like a no brainer.
Apple does a lot of stuff right, but there are more than a few areas where they fail to really provide value.
>For instance why haven't Apple just gotten the internet broadcast right to a lot of sports to build a moat around it -
It is possible that they want all or nothing rights. There are a ton of complicated rules by NHL/MLB/NFL/NBA on blackout games, parceling out different games to different broadcasters in different areas, and then of course, different broadcasters by country. All with different contract expiry dates.
I will not pay for sports until the sports organizations make it easy to find everything (within their sports org) in one place.
Yes, I think blackouts are sticking point for Apple because it is a terrible user experience. Their MLB Friday games are not subject to blackout rules, which is different from the MLB app experience.
Sports are an interesting approach for Apple, but in a way it makes sense as it is an area that has the opportunity to be disrupted. People loves sports but the consumption of sports can be a frustrating experience. Many leagues still do not have a good streaming experience and the leagues that do, such as MLB, are subject to blackout rules. If Apple can cut through the red tape to eliminate blackout rules and create a white-labeled app experience for sports leagues it might be lucrative for Apple and beneficial to the league and their fans.
I think this is the key - Apple is painfully famous for "it may be expensive, but it's really simple" - iTunes music was the same way. They want you to not have to think about it at all, so they want all or nothing (the all, of course, being available for a Price).
A lot of those rights are already bought up, in some sports. I suspect Apple will need to wait til those contracts expire, no matter how much they are willing to spend.
As for Apple TV+, no, it's not a no-brainer. The approach they took was to sign up a lot of creative talent, instead, and make their own content. That's already been a proven success, so it's hard to say that a diametrically-opposed approach (which is kind of lame and would not even result in any new content) was a "no-brainer".
> For instance why haven't Apple just gotten the internet broadcast rights to a lot of sports to build a moat around it - not because it is popular but because they can. With Apples finances they could also get alot of popular sports on Apple TV as well
Because it's not in the interest of those sports leagues to kill off their viewing audiences. The average person who has cable has ESPN channels as part of their basic cable package. You don't even NEED cable to watch a lot of sports because terrestrial television has sports on constantly. The NFL realized a long time ago that there is a niche market for those who want a sheer firehose of content... but the vast majority will not directly pay for it. Sports fans will just find something else to occupy their time with.
There is a lot of latent demand for people who just want to simply stream a game without having to pirate it or get worked around by the leagues. Most people I know today do it on illegal streams or share an mlb/nfl password with everyone they possibly know. Imagine if you monetized that market. The leagues are clearly too petty and incompetent to do it right, but Apple could make it really user friendly.
it's likely a loss leader strategy to get subscription numbers up. the long term goal is to replace cable... with cable-like appletv+. they're not expanding the pie, but rather fighting to capture existing pie, particularly against netflix & amazon, who they see as more direct competitors than traditional media companies. apple likes lives sports because there's no fan base to build up, and they get to just be a distributor (similar to music) rather than a content creator (which is a harder and riskier business). they don't like giving up editorial control, but they need the subscriber base.
frankly, i'm not a fan of this strategy as there's no synergy between the computing and content businesses, but apple has fallen for the relentless march to grow at all costs, and sees content as low-hanging fruit for them (again, i disagree with this assessment).
apple home, car, glasses, etc. make much more sense, but those are too slow growing for both professional and unprofessional investors alike.
Apple isn’t paying for rights to MLS to be part of AppleTV+. The exclusive deal is for the MLS to have their own “channel” that you subscribe to separately that you can only buy through the AppleTV app.
right, they want to draw people to the appletv app and entice them to subscribe to appletv+, via, for example, a tie-in with "ted lasso". in any case, they'd most certainly roll up those mls subscriptions into total subscriber numbers in any investor relations as "proof" of their strategy.
It also gives them a compelling way to tier their service & grow revenue from existing subscribers.
From this perspective, something like Sunday Ticket makes a lot of sense even with the hefty price tag, so long as they’re allowed to parcel out those games as they’d like.
This is probably one of the best decision by any TV provider.
MLS is going to blow up in the coming years. There is a lot of talk about US national team being very competitive in 2026 World Cup. MLS has produced stars already, like Alphonso Davies.
Once the hype gets higher and more money start being spent on soccer in the US, it will become a power house.
It's a gamble, because as of now they're not even the most popular soccer league in America let alone the world.
Liga MX (Mexican soccer) ratings destroy them for the obvious reasons (the league the US's largest most passionate soccer fanbase is most passionate about), EPL ratings beat them pretty handily as well (English Premier League, the highest profile and probably best of the European leagues).
Given the money and momentum behind MLS though, there is at least a chance by the end of this deal that they have become one of the top soccer leagues in the world and Apple looks extremely clever, which is not something you can really say for a lot of leagues with actual better soccer than MLS has right now.
It is weird that Apple, one of the biggest companies in the world, now has a vested interest in globally promoting a specific soccer league. MLS is probably thrilled with this compared to their current situation where ESPN+ does dump pretty much all the games onto streaming as content, but is generally disinterested in promoting it too heavily because of their vast prtfolio of already more popular sports.
MLS also lost linear TV ratings and viewership battles a few times this season to the women's league (NWSL), which a few MLS teams also own teams in. NWSL's media deals with CBS and Twitch are worth $4.5M/year, or less than 2% this deal from Apple.
Most of those NWSL matches where MLS lost in viewership were also just preseason tournament matches for the women's league. The season hadn't even started yet.
From a value prospective it might work out well. I don’t watch soccer and I’ll probably watch a few matches. I suppose it all comes down to the price they paid.
This will happen right after the year of Linux desktops.
The US National team being competitive in international is way too high of an expection from anyone that follows international soccer. The US is stuck geographically playing Mexico all. the. damn. time. They rarely play any European teams. They also rarely play good South American teams.
Until they regularly play good teams, they will stagnate going back and forth with Mexico. The same applies to Mexico too. The only way to get better is to keep playing better teams.
This overestimates the role of international soccer in predicting future international soccer success. Players get 99% of their development with their club teams. While it is crucial for Americans to regularly play good teams, this experience is mostly going to happen in top European leagues and the Champions League.
And we're in the midst of a huge boom period for Americans in Europe, with young Americans playing regularly for perennial Champions League teams Dortmund, Barcelona, Chelsea, Juventus, and Leipzig, a handful of starters on quality teams behind them, and major European teams spending more and more resources scouting American prospects.
Player quality is the main driver of international success: Belgium went from 57th-ranked in 2010 to 1st-ranked in 2015 (yes, FIFA rankings are bad, but they point to something real) not because of some change in scheduling philosophy but because they had a bunch of great players in 2015.
Belgium has not one but two players named Hazard, a Mertens, a Lukaku, a Tielemens, just to name a few. It's not surprising they've jumped in the standings with a squad like that. They also have Martinez as a coach.
Just look at the recent fixture list of the USMNT[0]. I'm really not meaning to offend, but these are not soccer power house types of squads they are facing.
The USMNT has a long long way to go. As long as there competition with American Throwball, basketball, baseball, etc, the US will suffer this level of mediocrity as the money potential just isn't there.
I do like your nomenclature of "American Throwball", I might use that one in the future.
This is the unfortunate truth, IMO. As long as football is a distant fourth or fifth in American sports priorities, I don't see a reality where it excels. Why would it, when the athletes who could probably do amazing go to the other sports where they make 20x as much at a minimum, but more likely 200x as much?
Given the current trajectory of things, I simply don't see it changing either. Without some sort of black swan event either seriously incentivizing football or disincentivizing the other sports, there is no immediate path to the traction necessary to make football popular enough in the States for the USMNT to be a world class player in the next few decades.
The fact that MLS came out with an ad campaign shouting themselves as the 5th Major Sport was such an abysmal PR campaign, that I just cannot ever respect them after the fact.
They are literally celebrating the fact that they are not EPL, they are not Championship, they are not League 1 and on down the line. WTF! were they thinking that self deprecation was going to work at that level???!!!! You know, when you're bored with NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, there's us little guys called MLS. No, you're not trying to buy a house, we're a real sports league. For reality not for realty!!!
I don't think the situation is that dire. For the USMNT, maybe—a lot of that is competition and coaching—but not for MLS and American players overall.
The US has way more European pros now, playing on good, Champions League caliber teams. MLS has attracted higher quality talent, and the farm teams are producing better talent domestically.
Not that dire!?! There's a reason that FIFA games gives MLS such a low star rating in the game. Ever sit down on a Saturday morning to watch EPL/Serie A/League 1/Bundesliga/etc and then watch MLS on Saturday evenings? It's like watching professionals all day followed by little league. The level of play is so so much different. It's like driving on a long road trip at highway speeds to finally make it home and forced to slow down to drive a city speeds. Your body just feels like things are in slomo. That's how I feel about MLS.
The EPL matches picked up over here for TV are between top-table, expensive clubs. Watch some bottom-table matches or matches from the Championship, and I'll think you'll find the quality isn't that far off from MLS.
US soccer including MLS has come a long, long way since 2010. Look at MLS from that era compared to today—it's night and day.
So you're trying to convince me the MLS is something to celebrate as it at best matches 2nd tier leagues in other countries? Hmmm... That's like suggesting watching minor league baseball teams instead of watching the majors. Although, there's probably just as large of an audience for that than MLS.
But please, tell me how EPL matches work. They have lots of money with high salaries to pay the top talent in the world and attract the best coaching minds you say? I can't imagine why anyone would rather watch that /s
I just dont see MLS "blowing up". Will it be more popular than today? Possibly, though I feel like its been given several chances to catch on and never has. Will it challenge NFL / NBA popularity in any way? IMO, absolutely not.
Back when I was involved in coaching youth soccer I found the other coaches had never heard of the New England Revolution, New York Red Bulls, L.A. Galaxy, etc.
These folks were fans of man united but had no interest at all in US soccer.
Who knows? Maybe not having lockouts will mean that if some team starts playing well people will be able to watch it. MLS definitely needs something to happen to get people interested but it seems to me they should relegate the whole league.
Our local small-town youth soccer league hosted a tournament over Memorial Day weekend. The nearest MLS team sent a big box truck with their logo painted on it, and set up a bunch of activities and a merchandise tent.
They are definitely working on improving engagement - but perhaps each team is at a different level ;)
A lot of the MLS teams are like this - Atlanta United, Austin FC, Sporting Kansas City, Toronto FC... It feels a bit clunky and "we wanna look more european" in my mind, but MLS is at least split between US and EU style for names.
There's literally "New York City Football Club" in the MLS.
My guess is that those are actually the teams you're least likely to have a lot of fans of. LA, NYC, and Boston all already have massive and influential sports teams. The folks likely to want to watch/know about MLS are in the cities that don't - Kansas City, Austin, to a lesser extent Atlanta or Portland.
MLS is being fairly smart with its expansion and focusing on cities where they're not trying to pull fans away from the NY Yankees or the LA Lakers or whatever. Sure, they still have teams there as well, but the die-hard fans are going to be in the towns where folks are happy to have any team to be excited for.
Correct, but if you look at the MLS in general, they have a lot of teams in under-served cities. The post I was responding to was claiming that the MLS is doing a bad job because there aren't many fans of the NYC teams, which may be true, but A. There's a lot of people in NYC, so even niche things can be popular enough to be a good idea. B. MLS has a lot of well-liked teams that aren't in major areas.
I'm near Orlando and it was a big deal when Orlando City came to town. That excitement has mostly subsided outside of Orlando proper and people are generally back to the Magic / NCAAF / NFL now.
It doesn't need to challenge NFL or NBA for there to be a lot of success and money made all around. The potential room for growth for MLS is massive in comparison with the other established big leagues that already have reached a saturation point have have less room to grow.
This is why the NHL has spent the last few decades starting up hockey teams in the American South where there's few fans instead of say, Saskatoon, where there'd be a legion of fans. In Saskatoon it's a small market and you'd already be top dog with no growth. In Phoenix you may never reach the other leagues, but even if you can move viewership by a few percentage points, the size of the market ensures massive gains.
Yep. Soccer's breakthrough in the USA has been "just around the corner" since the '80s. No matter how many PLAYSOCCER bumper stickers you shove in people's faces, they still don't care.
MLS is also a good place to see some of Europe's biggest stars play in the final years of their careers. I've always thought a league full of almost-retired legends was a good way to get some publicity.
I was a season ticket holder of a club that kept bringing in the older stars. Frankly, it was frustrating as a fan that wanted to see their team do well in the MLS Cup & US Open Cup. I was a ticket holder during one US Open Cup win and elimination in the semi finals of an MLS Cup run. The team did both without retiring international stars.
My perspective on the big money stars coming in is that it's a huge financial drain on the team for around 1/2-3 years of performance by the star. Yes, MLS has designated players (DPs), but last I looked, the first $500k in salary still counts towards the team's salary cap. I'm not sure what the salary cap is this year, but even if they've doubled it from the last time I paid attention, it'd only be $5M... It's a huge chunk of change relative to the rest of the team for not a lot of performance. Teams would largely be better off finding and growing youth talent than brining in another DP.
I finally gave up on my tickets after nearly 15 years because it was apparent the team wasn't interested in winning cups anymore. Ownership just wanted to fill the stadium with whatever retiring star they could get their hands on.
The best teams in MLS typically don't have any retired legends. This is a gimmick more commonly associated with not-so-good teams. Most good MLS teams are heavy with South American talent in their prime and, increasingly, products of their own academies.
MLS will steadily grow over the next decade, of that I have no doubt. I think soccer in America has a ceiling, though. NFL and NBA will be #1 and #2 for a long, long time, but MLS could surpass NHL, and maybe MLB by the end of the decade if its momentum continues.
In any case, I'm so geeked over this deal. MLS is the only league I enjoy anymore. I dig parity and salary-capped leagues, and soccer has this suspense about it where every minute matters unlike most other sports. Great pickup for Apple.
MLS doesn't yet have a good farm system like in Europe or other leagues here in the U.S. like MLB. Seems to be why you get a lot of older talent coming from elsewhere.
MLS is a distant 4th or 5th sport in the North America and I don't see that ever changing. European soccer (Premier League, La Liga, Serie A) will always be the pinnacle of soccer in the world. People want to watch the best teams and best players and MLS doesn't compare to the caliber of European soccer and never will.
U.S. Soccer is a joke : that goes for international and MLS. Top U.S. club is ranked 122 in the world : https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/soccer-predictions/glob... U.S. got beat by some central american club and did not qualify for world cup last time. MLS is a rigged league. Purported local "ownership" is a ruse. MLS management decides who wins championship. Real U.S. soccer fans follow top European leagues and UEAFA champions league.
Ah yes, the old "oi m8 I watch proper footy down the pub" archetype. MLS is "rigged," top Euro leagues like the one Bayern has won nine consecutive times are "not."
I'd consider myself a "real" soccer fan in the U.S. I watch and support my local club, attend USL games when I travel to cities with teams in the US, and any time I'm internationally traveling I always attend a local match whether that's EPL West Ham/Crystal Palace, Union Berlin/St. Pauli in Bundesliga II, or FK Zalgiris/Kaunus in Lithuania -- yes I've been to all of those.
The loyalty is to the game and the beauty that can flash no matter the league play. I sat down to watch a couple minutes of Sunday league last month, kid scored a banger off the post with good team buildup, was fun to watch if slower than watching Real Madrid/Liverpool the week before. This tiering is silly and entertainment can be found wherever you look -- hell people watch college sports religiously and the quality difference is massive from their pro equivalents.
That said, MLS grows in quality every year, exponentially over the last 5. If that growth continues and develops young players, coupled with 320million person pool of potential athletes, MLS will be awash with money to grow itself. Even if it just reaches Championship level play that's a wonderfully entertaining level of football.
I urge anyone curious about this topic to go and look how the US female soccer team performs globally, it truly speaks about how the US has a bad soccer team simply because all the talent is funneled elsewhere
The top Danish team is 102nd, and we barely lost our semifinal at the Euros in 2021. National league quality is not the same as talent pool quality. Especially not when cohesion is what truly matters in national teams. Just take a look at how France has performed in the last 4 Nations League games, even with their top-class players.
So what? People seem to enjoy the comedy club that is US soccer. That's all that matters for Apple which is trying to serve its home country and largest market: the US.
I'm sure after some time, if this is successful, they would expand to leagues from Latin America, then finally Europe.
the problem with soccer and rankings is that it suffers from wholly inadequate sample sizes, or alternatively, goals are too "big", encompassing and compacting too much information, to be used for dissecting quality. soccer rankings can't give you much indication of relative ability, as chance overwhelms quality in rankings.
that's one of the strengths of basketball (and other sports to varying degrees), both as a sport and as entertainment. games are won and lost on many samples that each count a small fraction toward the outcome. any single game's outcome can still be swayed by chance, but that's very unlikely for a series of games, upon which rankings are based.
So what? People seem to enjoy the comedy club that is US soccer. That's all that matters for Apple which is trying to serve its home country and largest market: the US.
I'm sure after some time, if this is successful, they would expand to leagues from Latin America, then finally Europe.
- Streamed over AppleTV so presumably very high quality
- No need for an AppleTV subscription
- No blackouts for local since local no longer exists
- Simulcast with linear Fox/ESPN/UDN without blackouts so no need for cable/YTTV
- Free with an MLS season ticket
This seems like the best thing ever. This seems better than the old MLSLive back in the early days of (unpirated) soccer streaming when NBC Sports Gold was free.
If they let you stream old games and don't remove them after a week or two that would be perfection.
If AppleTV brings quality to it, that could wind up being a major selling point, right now just the quality of the stream is often pretty poor and looks very second-class with MLS (and don't get me started on the twitter simulcasts with the UDN games).
Oh. Major League Soccer, not Multiple Listing Service for real estate.
Back in 2008, Google Maps had an overlay for foreclosures, so you could look at all the foreclosures in an area at once. The real estate industry hated that.
I hope this sets the standard for sports streaming moving forward. The way NBC packages the Premier League in the US is an absolute joke because of the broadcast restrictions they impose. I just want simplicity and access in my streaming service and I'm willing to pay for it.
Yeah, no blackouts is good. I find it hard to be optimistic about deals like this but maybe, just maybe, this sets some precedent for deals for other sports. Trying to navigate NHL and especially MLB blackouts is really obnoxious.
> The MLS live and on-demand content on the Apple TV app will be available to anyone with internet access across all devices where the app can be found, including iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV 4K, and Apple TV HD; Samsung, LG, Panasonic, Sony, TCL, VIZIO, and other smart TVs; Amazon Fire TV and Roku devices; PlayStation and Xbox gaming consoles; Chromecast with Google TV; and Comcast Xfinity. Fans can also watch on tv.apple.com.
The wide platform availability is an absolute win. Are there any big streaming dongles / systems that aren't covered here?
I think "Chromecast with Google TV" excludes older Chromecast devices. Not that I really blame Apple here, I've played around with Chromecasts a few times and they're wildly underpowered even if they are ubiquitous.
The appleTV remote couldn't change the volume on my tv for whatever reason. Since I bought a dumb monitor style TV the only option was to walk up to it and use the buttons. Switched to chromecast and the volume controls worked. Hard for me to imagine going back to apple, even if the chromecast is a tad slower.
The Apple TV remote can be configured to control volume via IR or through HDMI CEC. When plugged into a new display, the Apple TV tries to auto configure this based on what devices it detects. It's possible it messed up with IR and you just needed to manually set it to use CEC.
I would love to go back in time and tell my grandfather in the 1980s, who despite his age was pretty enamored with technology, that all of this newfangled stuff would actually make it more difficult for him to watch sports. You get cool and sleek looking "set top" devices, but oh sorry there's a labyrinth of "streaming" subscriptions you have to navigate to figure out how to watch your games. At some point, this kind of thing isn't helpful. I can steelman an argument that Apple and MLS doing this on a 10-year timeline at least gives us some consistency for where to go to watch MLS games (I'm not an MLS fan, I don't know how you'd watch it today), but more and more I give up on trying to figure out how to watch a NHL or MLB game without setting up some VPN to get around the blackout restrictions, and just pull out an old radio and listen on AM. I figure eventually that will go away too.
> more and more I give up on trying to figure out how to watch a NHL or MLB game without setting up some VPN to get around the blackout restrictions
The point of this deal is that there are no blackout restrictions. Every game is on the service, regardless of where you are worldwide. If you want to watch MLS games, you subscribe to this Apple service, and whether you are in the parking lot outside the stadium or in Indonesia, the game is on it.
None of your complaints have to do with technology. No one is stopping NFL/NBA/MLB/NHL/MLS/US Tennis/etc from adding a button on their website or app that lets you pay and watch a game.
The thing stopping you from watching it easily is those organizations preferring to outsource broadcasting and ad sales to other media sellers who demand exclusivity terms that make it harder for you to watch.
I agree. Each entity pulling its material so it can launch it on its own platform (recent example: Paramount Plus), is ridiculous. 10 different streaming services, a good £80+ a month. Each with its own app that has a different look & feel and navigation.
May as well just go back to the 1 provider model (cable/sat). At least you’ve only got 1 EPG etc to deal with.
I’ll add that this fragmentation also encourages piracy.
There’s a great business opportunity for a startup of they can strike deals with all streaming services & offer a single view/epg/site that presents all of the services you’re subscribed to in a single consistent way.
> May as well just go back to the 1 provider model (cable/sat). At least you’ve only got 1 EPG etc to deal with.
It is like that on the TV app for apple devices. You search what you want, you get the option to pay or subscribe, and you watch. The only hangup is when other content providers, like Netflix or sports organizations, choose not to allow Apple to search their content.
I was pretty young, but from what I remember of the 80s, other than Monday Night Football and playoffs, it was not possible to watch anything but local games at all, and many of the local games required add-on cable packages. Also, MLS didn't yet exist, so it wasn't possible to watch any MLS games at all.
The blackout restrictions suck where they apply, but at the same time, as a person who doesn't live in his hometown, without satellite or streaming packages, I wouldn't be able to watch the teams I care about at all except when they visit the teams that play where I live.
Steve Jobs was a visionary product guy but he’s no match for Tim Cook when it comes to being the CEO of a big company. Tim Apple is just built different.
"The same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies."
"The people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out."
This is the kind of deliberate, small moves that someone like Apple can do to slowly grow into a media empire. Make "big" deals with small fish and get people onboard.
>A broad selection of MLS and Leagues Cup matches, including some of the biggest matchups, will also be available at no additional cost to Apple TV+ subscribers, with a limited number of matches available for free. As an added benefit to fans, access to the new MLS streaming service will be included as part of MLS full-season ticket packages.
And this is a perfect way to do it - those who want it will jump right in, those who don't know but are interested have ways of experiencing it. And the biggest fans? They get it for free since they already have season tickets.
It's certainly a different apple. Having been a Mac user for 30 years on and off It's definitely more organized than the Spindler era and less hopeless than the Amelio era.
Jobs II helped set the stage and Tim is a great execution guy.
I am 100% sure Apple sees owning these rights and the Apple TV+ content factory in general as, in part, a way to fuel the demand for more sophisticated media consumption and production technologies through their devices.
Unless they decide to can the whole effort, it’s now obvious that the sports experience via Apple TV+ is going to be part of the VR headset story.
“This partnership is a historic first for a major professional sports league, and will allow fans around the world to watch all MLS, Leagues Cup,1 and select MLS NEXT Pro and MLS NEXT matches in one place — without any local broadcast blackouts or the need for a traditional pay TV bundle.”
The “around the world” part is huge for the MLS (and to a lesser extent for Apple). I’m in Europe and I’ve never watched an MLS game. But it looks like it’ll be the first and only football league that I’ll be able to watch in a civilized way so I’ll definitely give it a try.
Every soccer league is on a different provider. I'm in Canada. The Premier League is on DAZN. MLS is on Apple TV. La Liga is on fuboTV (or Amazon Prime). It's all the same sport. Multiply that by X if another family member is interested another sport. I don't know what the future holds, but the sports entertainment fragmentation might be hurting more than helping. Perhaps Apple is on their way to consolidate.
Over here in europe you need multiple providers for the same competition since the rights are split. Champions League football (as in soccer) requires a Sky, DAZN and Amazon Prime subscription if you want to see all matches (of your favorite club). Same thing with most domestic leagues.
"From early 2023 through 2032, fans can get every live MLS match by subscribing to a new MLS streaming service, available exclusively through the Apple TV app."
So the only way to watch MLS games is by subscribing to the MLS streaming service? Am I reading this right?
What do I get for my subscription during the off-season?
ESPN had a more in depth article outlining the deal:
Speaking to Sports Illustrated on Tuesday, MLS commissioner Don Garber emphasized that the commitment isn’t a traditional broadcast arrangement, wherein a league exchanges the rights to its games and content for a negotiated rate. Rather, MLS and Apple have entered a partnership where each is incentivized to grow the business. Garber declined to reveal the economics (MLS reportedly was seeking up to $300 million annually), but he said the league will receive a base fee along with a percentage of subscription sales. Sports Business Journal reported that Apple’s guarantee to MLS will be $250 million per year. MLS and Apple will create a production studio, hire presenters and English-, Spanish- and French-speaking announcers, develop shoulder programming and produce a live whip-around show on Saturday nights.
This might answer your question:
Although the days of club-specific, regional broadcasts will end following the 2022 season, linear networks like ESPN, Fox or Univision are still in frame to negotiate a broadcast deal. Those games will be simulcast, however, by Apple. Local blackouts also will become a relic from the past.
More details:
— The dedicated digital platform will allow MLS to schedule matches at more regular and predictable times. Garber said there are 60 different start times across the 2022 season. From next year, MLS will schedule as many games as possible on Saturday nights, with occasional mid-week games on Wednesdays.
— Standard broadcast windows will include a 30-minute pregame show and postgame content. Club radio feeds will be available in addition to league broadcasters.
— MLS full-season ticket holders will receive a complementary subscription, and select games will be available to Apple TV+ subscribers at no additional cost.
— Content will be available on the Apple TV app on all Apple devices; Samsung, LG, Panasonic, Sony, TCL, VIZIO, and other smart TVs; Amazon Fire TV and Roku devices; PlayStation and Xbox gaming consoles; Chromecast with Google TV; Comcast Xfinity and on tv.apple.com.
> The MLB production is crap. They really need to stop making it look like an Apple product.
There are a few things I would change (the odds gotta go, and I wouldn’t mind a more compact scorebug) but on balance I really like their choices. Give me Apple’s gfx package over Bally or TBS any day of the week.
I hope companies start doing this in European leagues. It's going to be difficult but I don't want to be forced to use an ISP and pay €150 per month to watch 4 matches of my team. I hope stream reduces these costs. DAZN is doing some improvements on this path, but it's still not enough.
Assuming there's no super-fine print that somehow says otherwise and can be enacted on a whim, making sure there's no broadcast restrictions is very smart.
I've wanted to use NBA league pass in the past to follow my team, and the crazy broadcast restrictions meant that on the rare occasion I had the time to watch a game, it was a shot in the dark as to whether or not I'd actually be able to. On many occasions it was very upsetting to have an evening to myself wanting to simply watch a game I felt I paid for and to find out my game wasn't actually available after all.
I understand that the sports leagues customers are really the cable channels who pay them big cash for the broadcast rights, but this kind of thing was a big part of what killed my extreme enthusiasm for pro sports.
I think there is some confusion. Apple is not making MLS games available as part of AppleTV+ - the streaming service - it will be available as a channel that you pay extra for within the AppleTV app.
And the AppleTV app is available on most streaming devices including the AppleTV hardware device.
Making this available for free to all season ticket holders which is a really nice benefit. Right almost Austin FC games are broadcast locally over the air, but I'm really excited about being able to watch easily when I travel.
I stream my hometown's hockey and baseball games, because I don't have a choice (I no longer live in the region), but it's a second-rate experience for one fundamental reason: buffering delays.
I routinely get messages in my group chat that are a reaction to something that hasn't yet happened on my screen. The group chat makes for fun communal viewing, so I don't want to leave it, but these messages undermine the experience.
I watch sports OTA whenever I can and if I lived in my hometown there's no doubt I'd choose to watch my local teams on cable. Live sports moving to streaming services is an unfortunate trend.
The buffering has always been a problem, I remember my friend would come running into the room because he'd heard on live radio what was about to happen on the screen we were watching.
I know people are often sceptical about Apple, but here is yet another example of them doing something that makes me go "hmm yes that's better than everyone else". They're still not back to their Jobs days in terms of uniqueness and innovation, but I am glad that Apple and their race-to-the-top philosophy exists in this market
???, they made a deal to sport league to increase the market share of their services and made people lock in their ecosystems,
it make sense but I don think is philosphy perspective.is simply content that Mach their interests .
They’re addressing a real pain point that real people actually have and regularly fork out money for. The fact that they didn’t do it out of altruism means diddly squat.
It's hard to guess, but based on this press release guessing is all that we can do, so..
The UI for sports is currently terrible, by and large. The best you can do - despite the fact that everyone has a computer attached to and/or in their TV these days - is stream a linear broadcast channel. With this deal, Apple can show you a dashboard of all the games currently playing so you can pick a close and/or intresting one. You could choose a different audio channel - say, crowd noise only or a mic attempting to pick up what a manager is shouting at their players. Picture and picture if a goal is scored in another game. Probably way more than all of this.
From this POV, buying content is merely the price of admission to using technology to completely change and improve the sports viewing experience. Like I said, I'm just guessing at what Apple is thinking, but it stands to reason they have some technology angle on this if they feel like they are the right people to mount an attempt at improving this experience.
Funny you mention that - one of the odder parts of this press release is the fact that this service is going to be included with MLS team season ticket packages. I'd been try to figure out how and/or why it's in Apple's interest to give away this service to season ticket holders; some sort of AR tech being part of the overall plans is a decent guess as to why.
I assume this is something MLS wanted out of the deal and Apple conceded. It makes the season tickets even more valuable for every team in the league. Do you really think Apple demanded a subscription give-away?
> Do you really think Apple demanded a subscription give-away?
I don’t, but it’s really not the most outlandish idea. It gives every season ticket holder a reason to either buy an Apple TV or, maybe more importantly, start using the Apple TV app on their existing devices.
Imagine you’re an Orlando City fan who’s happy with Hulu and never really cared to open the Apple TV app on your Samsung TV. Now that you’re using Apple TV to watch matches, though, you’ve started to come across some of those other shows you’ve heard people talk about.
Ted Lasso seems pretty cool, maybe you’ll sign up for Apple TV+ and give it a try…
But season ticket holders as a group are probably the ones most likely to pay for a season of MLS. Why not let them pay and get exposed to Ted Lasso on their own dime?
I'm not assuming Apple demanded it, I'm just wondering aloud why Apple conceded.
This deal is 8x the 2022 MLS TV deal annually, and the current deal doesn't have anything like this. It seems insane to me to imagine MLS telling Apple "8x our current deal and you have to give it to our biggest fans for free."
Fair enough. But MLS viewership has risen since the last deal. Before this announcement, it was speculated MLS was looking for a $300M/year deal. So it doesn't seem so insane to me.
This is such an intelligent move, and one I've been secretly hoping Apple would make: get the streaming rights to a league that's "up and coming" and very popular with a younger demographic for what I assume is a bargain compared to most other top leagues. Sure, it's not the NFL or NBA, but it's a great addition nonetheless. This is an insta-subscribe for me.
An additional detail for those wondering about Apple’s sports plans, is that all MLS games will be on Wednesday and Saturday nights[0]. Those are not coincidentally two nights that the NFL does not play on.
That these are worldwide rights is also interesting, that almost never happens for sports deals because there's usually more money to be had chopping up broadcast rights and selling them per country.
Also interesting is this:
> At launch, all MLS and Leagues Cup matches will include announcers calling the action in English and Spanish, and all matches involving Canadian teams will be available in French.
So, are they keeping the door open for additional languages in the future? Is this subscription available world-wide?
Let's be honest here: Premier league matches aren't exactly cheap to watch. If this is cost-effective and available in a lot of languages, it's an opportunity to watch some matches that are at least at a certain minimum professional level.
