‘Friday Night Baseball’ Is Just The Start Of Apple’s Foray Into Live Sports
After years of talk about Apple’s interest in live sports programming, Tuesday brought some news: Apple TV+ will pay $85 million per year for the next seven years for exclusive rights to two Friday night MLB games a week.
While there are reasons to question the value of owning Friday night baseball inventory — especially during summer, when TV viewership typically dips — the allure of this move for Apple and MLB are pretty clear up front.
MLB diversifies its revenue streams, gets a greater foothold into streaming (especially paired with the new Peacock deal) and creates a new “property” that didn’t previously exist. Apple, of course, gets live sports rights for a major U.S. league and further adds legitimacy to its streaming platform as it continues to beef up that offering content-wise.
We recently discussed how an MLB deal could fuel an interesting streaming future for Apple, and that point still stands. With every service — even Disney+ — seemingly introducing ad-supported tiers, MLB programming opens the door for Apple to bring ads to the service as well. After all, Apple could obviously use Apple TV+ ad inventory to promote its vast array of products. That’s a powerful anchor for other brands to follow suite in a highly targeted environment with the built-in cache provided by the Apple brand.
It’s also assumed that this is only the beginning of Apple’s future diving into live sports rights.
Since Apple is one of the world’s richest companies, and it has designs on becoming a larger player in TV, it has a great deal of money to burn here that other (linear-tethered) streaming competitors beyond Amazon (and perhaps Netflix) just don’t. It’s why the company won’t blink at whatever a potential NFL Sunday Ticket carriage deal could cost, should they take those rights over Amazon and ESPN+. And it’s why they’re likely to throw their hat into the ring for various TV rights bids coming up — including the Pac-12, NBA, NASCAR, Big Ten and more.
Even without winning rights for any of those entities outright, Apple could also just carve out small pieces of various pies, the same way it just did with MLB. That could come in the form of one-off games, like maybe a Saturday or Thursday night exclusives for Pac-12 football games. Or it could even go as far as paying to absorb something like MLB.TV the same way ESPN+ did with NHL.TV this past October.
That’s why this initial foray with MLB is so important. It’s a foot in the door with live sports, and makes it easier to sell in every successive deal, when Apple was already willing to pay more for rights than broadcast networks. As more premium rights head exclusively to streaming services a la this deal and Amazon’s Thursday Night Football set-up with the NFL, it gets harder to ignore the dollars streaming services are willing to throw at these leagues — and harder for consumers to remain beholden to linear TV.
The transition won’t come overnight. But the tipping point is approaching for consumers “making the switch” to streaming, so to speak, with sports and news being the major dominos left. Whether Apple leads the charge or is the direct beneficiary of the shift, it seems well-positioned either way, especially if it remains at its current price point of just $4.99 per month.
